2012 Redux

5 November 2025

We continue with another early blogpost, from 2012, the first month I had a website. I believe there was a post before this one, but I have been unable to locate it, nor can I remember. Below, I am writing about a time 20 years earlier (1992), when I had struggled for four years to draft the first novel of my epic, then named Staff of Shigmar. I had gone so far as to submit it to a publisher for review, where they held it for 14 months before returning it with the typical form letter rejection. . . .

23 July 2012

After finishing the drafts of Staff of Shigmar and A Sword for Rebellion, while waiting for a response from a publisher, I asked my friend, who now lived on the east coast, the same one who read the original draft, if he would mind reading the two novels and giving me feedback. He was willing, so I sent him those two drafts. When he sent them back, he included several pages of honest, brutal criticism. He thought that the collaboration was good, and only needed a little work for publication; he said he liked the story idea for the Staff, but that there were many fundamental errors with characterization and plot, although he thought the story had more potential. To be honest, I was devastated by the criticisms, believing that I had written a ‘masterwork’ (everyone believes this of his own works!), but I had to admit that he was right, his criticisms justified. I also believe that his honest criticism was what convinced me (us, really) to return to school. At the time, I had no job (demand for political philosophers is, as one might imagine, not very high), having lost it the previous year. As I sidenote to this job loss, three weeks after losing my job, I finished the first draft of Staff, upon which I had been working four years.

We went back to college in the fall of 1994, with three children; I started to work on a second Bachelor’s in English, and my wife a Master’s in Education. Because we didn’t register until the summer, the only creative writing course I could get was poetry, which vaulted me onto the road of becoming a poet, and I learned the next semester, in the advanced class, that I was very good at narrative poetry–poems that tell a story. This revelation was no surprise to one who desired to become a novelist! (We’ll deal with the poet in another post. . . .)

During my second semester, I took my first (and last) fiction writing course. I soon saw that the course was useless to me, involving the writing of a journal, where we recorded ideas, and the workshopping of one’s current short project. Workshopping is probably one of the most useless of the writing exercises. As an instructor of writing, I was required to have the students do this action with every paper, and it did nothing to change my initial assessment: how one can expect improvement by the ‘blind leading the blind’ is beyond me, and that is what the fiction writing course was like: wanna be writers telling other wanna be writers how to improve their writing–absurd! The one and only useful comment I got in the course when ‘reviewing’ a short story of mine came from probably the only other person in the class with any real talent, and the ‘last nail in the coffin’ came one day before class, when one of my classmates was reporting how he had taken an illegal drug over the weekend and had an incredible trip that he was going to write about. I told him that if he needed drugs to find inspiration, he was in the wrong discipline!

I also realized that semester that I had gotten more benefit (to my writing) from the few literature courses I had taken, and these were all general education/introductory courses, nothing compared to what would follow. I switched from creative writing to literature, which set me on the path for a doctorate. Also, I learned as a graduate student that I was good at teaching (and enjoyed it). Teaching writing can also help to improve one’s writing (it can also make one’s writing worse, reading all those lousy essays!), for one can no longer simply declare, “it’s correct because it sounds right,” one must learn grammar inside and out so that one can correctly grade that endless string of student essays, but there is a danger that if one reads too many, there is a negative effect on one’s writing. Adjuncts who teach writing are the most overworked and underpaid people in the world!

One of the benefits of the University of Idaho’s creative writing program was that they had a fund to bring published writers to campus for readings and workshops. I managed to get into one by Samuel Delaney, and got feedback from him on one of my short stories. He told me that it would be better not to see the monsters in my story, to create more tension–very Hitchcockian. I learned from that experience that those writers we idolize are really not that different from the rest of us; the fact that he only had that single criticism of my work also told me that I was on the right track. I threw myself completely into my study of literature.

To be continued. . . .