assignments ENGL226 Writing About Writing: WRITING AS ART
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Overview. We end the semester with the most obvious assignment. When students elect to work in the Writing and Writing Studies Concentration, it is most often because they want, as they say, to be a writer. They have an idea in their head that got put there when they were ten or eleven. Maybe it involved being a newspaper reporter and breaking news a la Watergate--Deep Throat, "Follow the Money," Woodward & Bernstein style. Or perhaps the imagined themselves to be a poet, though others didn't even know it, suffering for their art, wearing a lot of black, probably a beret too. Quill pens and ink wells were not out of the question. Maybe they imagine themselves to be the next Stephen King or Danielle Steele--or maybe they imagined writing something more literary but equally lucrative. Whatever the writing fantasy, the problem is that this does not help students become any sort of writer at all. Keeping the writing life at the gauzy level of fantasy is unhelpful.
Thus, this assignment asks you to consider the under-belly of writing as art. What does it mean to get an MFA? How do you go about getting published? How do you go about making yourself a professional writer as opposed to a hobbyist or some wide-eyed dreamer? The difference between wannabes and writers is not publication. It's threefold: 1) the discipline to write regularly; 2)
Thus, this assignment asks you to consider the under-belly of writing as art. What does it mean to get an MFA? How do you go about getting published? How do you go about making yourself a professional writer as opposed to a hobbyist or some wide-eyed dreamer? The difference between wannabes and writers is not publication. It's threefold: 1) the discipline to write regularly; 2)