Avoid that Major!

I will now partake in my favorite activity:  Bashing aspiring writers who become Creative Writing majors in college.

So, young high schooler, you want to learn how to become a writer.  Here’s what The Princeton Review has to say on you spending $50,000 a year on becoming a Creative Writing major:

“Often pictured sitting in dark little cafés, scrawling furiously on a piece of paper, or sitting alone at a typewriter punching out the next Great American Novel, the creative writer always seems to stand alone in his or her own world. How do you get to be the next Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner or Toni Morrison? Well, you write a lot, and then, if you can, you major in Creative Writing.”

Now, young innocent writer, before you launch yourself into debt, I will ask you:  How many writers can you think of at the top of your head who wrote their bestselling novels as a part of a Creative Writing class assignment?  (That’s right, 0.  Null.  Nada.)  Now scan through the Creative Writing/English course listing for your favorite four-year private university.  How many of them list “How to Market Your Book”?  How many classes can you find on writing queries, pitches, structuring your novel, adding suspense, creating BAMF characters?

I bet  $100 that you can learn more about writing queries and marketing your book on Twitter.  Hold me to it, people!

Good writing comes from practice, revision, learning your craft and learning everyone else’s crafts as well.  You can analyze Wuthering Heights to their heart’s content, but it probably won’t help you sell your book.  At most, you fill figure out how Emily Bronte appealed to her audience with a very specific book.  As much as editors, agents, and writers, and I love Wuthering Heights (and I really do love Wuthering Heights), I can guarantee you that your Wuthering Heights-esque novel is going to have a tough time in the market.

Now, I am not a published author.  I am also not an English or Creative Writing major, so some of you might be raising your eyebrows when I thoroughly bash the Creative Writing majors out there.  But hear me out–simply because I’ve been doing this for a long time.

If you’re becoming an English or Creative Writing major to learn about great literature, analyze great literature, and write to please some professor and his ideas of The Perfect Story, knock yourself out and use your $200,000 education on something you can learn on your own online anyway.  If, however, you’re becoming a English or Creative Writing major to become a published writer…  You, my friend, need a reality check.

If you want to survive in today’s publishing business, you better learn from today’s writers–not from Poe.  (Alcoholism + Writing = Nasty Career Choices.)  Keep writing on what you believe you should write, not what your professor thinks you should write.  Build a platform.  Learn the in’s and out’s of the market well before you submit anything for publication.  Polish your grammar, then break it to pieces knowingly when you write dialogue.

And in college, if you’re itching to spend $200,000, spend it on something that’s specifically not Creative Writing or English–unless you plan on becoming a journalist, librarian, editor, professor, or something else that requires an English degree.  The idea for writers in college is to get the experience.  Your character is a young white woman living on a tobacco plantation located in present-day Georgia.  Do you know what everyday life consisted of before the Civil War?  You want to write science fiction.  Do you know the physics of your world?  You build a world in which two races are at war with each other?  Do you know how wartime politics can create conflict in your story?  If you don’t, no worries, but hitting the books will certainly inspire you.

In reality, college probably won’t help you write your novel.  (Most likely, it will hinder it.)  But to a writer, no knowledge is wasted knowledge.  New experiences are the basis of inspiration.  That’s where college comes in. Go through college for the sheer experience of it, to learn stuff you can’t learn anywhere else (stuff that you’d never thought you’d learn), and to meet a diverse people from around the world who are more than happy to share their experiences with you.  As a side benefit, you will be (hopefully) employable by the time you graduate with your B.A in political science degree, so paying off your $90,000 in loans will be a piece of cake.  (Right, recently-graduated Creative Writing majors?)

On a somewhat unrelated note, Writers should be thrill-seekers.  If someone asks you to do something ridiculous, you do it unless it will really screw up your chances of living a healthy life.  Camped out three days in the desert?  Check.  Spent all night at a political rally?  Check.  Spent a day volunteering at the homeless shelter?  Check.  You don’t have to experience all of that–but each experience uniquely qualifies you to tell a story no one else can.  And you do all that in college (and then live to tell about it).  College is the opportunity to learn–not just from books (please note, you do have to do all that book-learning in college), but from experiences and people.

So go to college, if you can’t think of anything better to do.  Just don’t waste your money on that coughuselesscough Creative Writing major.

Ditch the Keyboard

When I was an eleven-year-old, I used to spend my summers curled up in a nice air-conditioned room in the house with a pencil, a stack of papers, and no distractions other than the occasional parent who would tell me to move out, at which point I’d just find another quiet location.  A couple years later, however, computers seduced me into believing that I needed a keyboard and an internet connection to write.

Not true.

To write, I only need something to write with and something to write on.

So, after the last few months of banging my head at the keyboard and an empty screen (only to be distracted by shiny Twitter and shiny Facebook and shiny iChat), I finally gave up and reverted back to pen-and-paper writing.  “When all else fails, go back to your roots,” I told myself.

The beauty of pen-and-paper writing comes with its permanence. Aside from tearing up the paper, there is no DELETE key to axe my project. To keep my pages pretty, I minimize scratching out words.  I keep the words flowing.  It feels good to have physical contact with my writing, shaping them like artwork.  Running with words during an action scene, slowing down otherwise.

In addition, pen-and-paper writing is meant for myself. I can’t expect anyone to read my chicken scratch without getting a headache, so the pressure is off. When I do decide to let others enter my world, I can type it up–and by then, it will be a necessary revision.

Of course, the problem is time spent on taking an unnecessary step in the writing process and there exists the overhanging danger that I will refuse to look at what I have written ever again and that I will never get around to typing it. But that’s okay, since this is an exercise to get myself writing again.

Any kind of writing is good writing right now. I will be happy to have just finished another novel, even if I never manage to type what I have written with pen and paper.

Tinkering for the College Girl Who Didn’t

Girls in engineering hear it in college all the time:  Boys talking about how they pulled apart their computers when they were six and then rebuilt it from scratch, without the manual, making their high-tech Box-of-Wonders faster and loaded with ten gazillion extra goodies that weren’t included in the initial buying package.

Okay, maybe that a bit of exaggeration–but if there’s something I’ve learned as one of only two girls in my technology-driven major, girls in engineering with no tinkering background are in for some amount of discomfort when they venture into the world of passionate baby-boy-engineers.  After three years of taking physics laboratory courses and trying to find my way into Tinker World, I’ve learned two things:

1. Magazines like MAKE are targeted to men who tinker, who encourage their boys to tinker, while they relegate women to CRAFT and “geek chic.”
2. In college laboratory classes, boys have the confidence to plug in wires where wires don’t necessarily belong, while girls stand back in fear of breaking something.  In fact, naturally-dominating boys + girls without tinkering backgrounds = girls-who-look-but-don’t-touch.

I’m not saying that MAKE and CRAFT aren’t terrific magazines (because they are).    I am also not saying that men in engineering are consciously inconsiderate of women in engineering; however, that doesn’t change the fact that the other girl Engineering Physics major and I are often found lamenting our look-but-don’t-touch status in our various laboratory groups.

This really is a comment on why you don’t see baby-girl-engineers even in today’s tech-driven world.  It’s because their mothers never tinkered.  You know it’s a problem when experienced college girls seek lab partners who have never touched an oscilloscope and when they are grateful when their partners don’t show up to Saturday crunch-time in the circuits lab.

Even if girls-who-didn’t-tinker manage to miraculously get their hands on the circuit or the power drill, girls hardly feel fulfilled afterward or feel as if they’ve learned as much as their male counterparts.  Typical universities don’t teach tinkering and they seldom have the resources to encourage individualized experiential learning that leads to breakage of precious electronic equipment.  This means that college girls can get away with packing their resumes math-rich college courses and even college laboratory experiences–while at the same time filling up their insecurity meter on dealing with technology.  Suffice to say that it will be a problem when they get a job in the male-dominated field.

The solution to all of this is an easily-stated fact:  Build something, break stuff, get your hands dirty, just start, etc.  In reality, this is more difficult than it sounds for busy college girls.

Time is one critical problem.  I’ve seen more girl engineers hop to join girl-engineering-power sororities and other social groups rather than spending their valuable time joining meaningful hands-on engineering student clubs like Engineers Without Borders.  While social support for girls in engineering is important, it’s more important for girl engineers to get comfortable dealing with males on real engineering projects and gaining confidence independently outside the bonds formed by sympathetic females.

Imagine my surprise when I sent an e-mail to some 30+ Phi Sigma Rho sisters (who are all engineers), encouraging them to go to a Case’s Rising Engineers and Technological Entrepreneurs meeting, which offers fantastic projects opportunities at CWRU–and none of them showed up!

Girls:  Don’t DO This.  Make hands-on learning your first priority, and Society of Women Engineers (SWE) the second.  You would think that organizations like SWE and Phi Sigma Rho would naturally offer plenty girl-powered projects, but I’ve joined all of these women-orientated engineering clubs–and they don’t.  Understand that these are social groups meant to provide girls in engineers with leadership experience and networks.

Money is another problem.  Girls have been taught to be good.  Good girls don’t smash their technology with a hammer.  Good girls are cautious.  Good girls save money.  Good girls certainly don’t spend money on technology for the sole purpose of smashing it to bits.  Screw that.  From now on, Lady Ada is your hero and Goddess.  What comes from her mouth is doctrine.  Believe me.

The initial shock of breaking things you’ve bought with your hard-earned money will slowly erode away; you only have to leap and trust the that the process of breaking with lead the way.  Girl engineers avoid breakage like the plague, while boys seem to view breakage as a part of the process to learn.  Girls:  take their example, throw caution to the wind, and break things.  (Or otherwise try to fix something that is already broken, to start.  Doing that will eventually lead you to break stuff on your own.)

With some caution, some Googling for help when things go awry, and some girl-savvy independence outside the sisterhood, busy college girls can also become tinkerers and start rebuilding their sense of self-worth and -confidence in this male-dominated field.

Writers are Entreprenuers

A writer I respect recently commented that “Writers are capitalists.” That may be, but I believe that writers are actually entrepreneurs.  I have come up with a list of six characteristics that writers and entrepreneurs share.

1. Writers and entrepreneurs recycle and reinvent ideas to establish a new “spin” on a product (this includes books).
2. Writers and entrepreneurs must persevere on their own dime, often after a “day-job”, in order to write a publishable manuscript/start a company.
3. Writers and entrepreneurs, in today’s age, must build their own platform and “brand”–and they must embrace emerging technology, such as Twitter, to do so.
4. Writers and entrepreneurs must not fear rejection, but should work towards acceptance.
5. Writers and entrepreneurs must embrace networking of all forms.
6. Writers and entrepreneurs work on their own terms, even if partially restricted by seed funding sources or agents/editors.

In light of these similarities, I think writers would benefit if they thought themselves as entrepreneurs and learned some of the strategies that entrepreneurs use to survive in the newbie business world.

Working for Passion

So. I screwed up.

I think any fortune teller with a knack for good sense would have seen it at the beginning of last semester: Urvi, huddled on the ground, jobless and passionless about anything resembling work.

This, my friends, is called burn-out. It’s what happens when you try to do too many things in too little time and force yourself to believe that you have the abilities of a Do-It-All God. Kids, learn from me: Don’t do it. Don’t tell yourself that you can take a full semester of challenging technical college courses, work part time as a teaching assistant, write your novel, work on personal electronics projects, attend club meetings (for clubs that actually do work), and somehow manage to squeeze in multiple research projects if you’re still breathing after all of that. Because that doesn’t work.

And because I was silly enough to believe that it WOULD work (and that I would miraculously find a way to MAKE it work, because that’s just the way I am), I am now without a paying job at the facility I have wanted to work in for months now. And I regret it.

So, with dread and panic growing inside of me, I moved back to Cleveland last week, trying to remedy all the screw-ups I’ve accumulated over the last semester. I regret that I didn’t get my goals accomplished, so I’m going to fix it this summer. I don’t have a paying job anymore, but I’m volunteering my time at MeRCIS, simply because I want to. (It’s proving to be a beautiful experience.) I’m writing. I started a sketchbook. I’m still learning electronics. And I’m going to stop there before I completely overwhelm myself again.

I have never felt more liberated in my life, nor have I felt more scared of what this spells out for my future. I am relieved that I have a resume-building job, but panic-stricken about everything else.

So, my friends, I’m going to challenge you: Take a break this summer. Do something for passion. I am beginning to see a little bit more happiness now that I’ve started untangling myself from this mess to focus on pursuing my passion. I encourage you to do the same.