If there is something I love and dread more than anything else about trying to be a writer, it is workshops. They are the fodder of the pretentious windbag and the aspiring new Danielle Steele. They are, in fact, the place where you go to find out if your writing is in any way good and instead have to play nice with people whose writing makes you want to claw your own eyeballs out and spill the goo on their papers.
Case in point is the untitled bit of cynical, jaded New York CRAP that I had to read for class. A young narrator, cryptically arrogant and harmed by the tragedies of his intelligence and the cruelties of a fickle urban world complains about how the world is unfair, not nice, generally sucky, and spends his time ramming creative metaphors about the modern world being equated with filth down the reader’s throats. In the end, the witty windbag narrator goes on and on about the way the world is and never really does ANYTHING in the entire story. A day in the life of a gasbag who complains about other gasbags.
Welcome to the modern ‘hip’ writers, the jaded and cynical cats and kittens who think that the world is just so ‘over’ that they don’t know how to write about a single happy thing. They are the overly serious, take themselves way too seriously humans who can’t see a ray of light if it came down and singed their nosehairs. They’re the kind who get published in the trendy mags and make the world sound like a dripping, festering sewer full to the brim with happy idiots and only one, miraculously intelligent person: them. They are the sole voice of intellect in a land of foolishness, and they are there to set you free.
Please. PLEASE. Grow up.
You are not the only voice of truth in this world. You are not the only one who has insight. And your jaded, cynical bullshit is not only not fun to read, it has no plot, no purpose, and is much the stuff of a famous quote: all noise and fury and nothing more. And frankly, I’m tired of it. PASS. Go back and find your plot, man, you lost it under all your emo.