White Knight Awards

[lit_gal]

Wow...

I was seeing yin_again and janedavitt posting about their White Knight Award nominations, and so I wandered over there to see some of the offerings (which are great), and I found my own Learning Curve nom'ed for best crossover and the original Trickster nom'ed for best Vamp!Xander (although if there aren't more nominations, that category may not fly this round. 

Thank you!

I've been taking writing classes at the university thinking to polish some skills, but the muse has been taking some major hits as the professors seem to ask for things that don't make much sense to my writer's mind.  I'm still trying to figure out if I have a prof who is a prof because he couldn't make it as a writer or if I just have too much hubris mixed up here to see that I need to change.  But the awards are a wonderful pick-me-up after a hard week of not feeling quite so solid about my own writing.

Oh, and I want to go nominate, but I totally forgot where to find this story, so I'm announcing a FIC SEARCH.

It's a wonderful series with the five ways Xander and Spike didn't meet, each one completely desconstructing canon.  Sound familiar? 

Comments

[cindershadow.livejournal.com]

I'd think that a writing class could be good . . . if you got helpful feedback from peers and from teacher, and if it provided an impetus to write more. You've already got the second one covered, obviously! Regarding the first, I guess my worry would be that the current style in commericial fiction is one I don't particularly care for, and there might be a risk of being urged/forced to adopt that style. (Now, if one did it for fun--as a writing exercise, not an invalidation of one's own style--that would be different!) One advantage of having been a voracious and indiscriminating reader as a child is that I found novels from many, many eras in the Public Library, which made me realize that "good" fiction of one era was often looked down on in another . . . and while one might hope there would be some discernable constants across the years, trendiness could really dominate. But it can be a challenge to have confidence in your own choices when authority figures see things differently. (I know I needed five years of distance and doctoral study to realize why my senior thesis had been devalued: none of those professors felt the field of Western history had any real significance, and they didn't know the big issues in it. I won't say it was a great piece of work, but when I revisited five years later--because it took that long for the pain of its reception to recede!--I found it was a solid and fairly interesting piece of work, after all!)

So--short version: congratulations on the well-deserved awards!

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

The impetus to write ORIGINAL fiction is what made me sign up for the class, and I am getting some wonderful advise about creating original characters and motivation. However, other aspects of his teaching seem out of step with published fiction. He wants ALL linking verbs out of writing. I agree that good writing needs to have strong verbs, but sometimes "is" really is the best word choice to avoid sounding awkward. And the outlining structure he wants us to use absolutely kills any and all desire to write the attached story.

And I agree that sometimes you can't evaluate your own work until you have time, which is why I'm wondering if the class is chafing because of his teaching or my need to break some bad writing habits. *shrug* I don't know yet.