Literary. Or Not.

To follow up on my writing school post, I was in Memoir class yesterday, soaking in some glowing comments about the fictionalized memoir pages I had turned in last week. "Very funny and visual!" "Great voice!" "Contemporary and marketable!"

Totally genius, I thought, just a tad smug. After all, I worked on those pages. I re-worked them after my first session of Janet's class, creating high-brow-esque metaphors, trying to sound like a real writer, using to sensory details to make my readers "feel" it.

Then, the critiques began, always a longer list than those glowing comments. Most were totally right and I am grateful to receive them. It was my teacher's off-handed comment about how my voice was "casual," and "notliterary," that stoked my fires.

Not literary? Not literary?! How humiliating. Especially because I really thought that, this time, I was literary. I could feel the literary-ness coursing through my veins, collecting in my fingertips and propelling just the right taps on my MacBook's white keys.

Not literary.

So, I decided that I am going to post fiction on here once a week. Not to prove that I, in fact, am literary. I am reading my pages to Fitch and co. tonight, so unless she decides I am a literary genius, I'm guessing I will still be decidedly "casual" tomorrow as well. But I have to do these two page shorts for Fitch each week and she wants us to rework them after we get comments. She's not going to grade them, she said, reworking is just for our own growth. And I apparently really, really need it.

But by putting out my promise to cyberspace to post these re-manifestations of me trying to be literary, 1) I will actually re-work them, and 2) I will have to be accountable for my literary-ness or lack thereof. Both good for that growing I need to do.

Yeah, so that comment kinda pissed me off, right?