Wilbur Wright Finally Opens Up About Creative Writing.

Below are a couple of pieces of writing I have done recently for my Theories of Fiction class. You were probably smart enough not to pursue an English degree (you probably majored in something like Getting-a-Job or Having-a-Skill) and so I will briefly tell you what a Theories of Fiction class is:

Basically it is just a study in how writing works and what it does. Sort of. Imagine that you wanted to learn how to fix a bicycle and so you took a class called “Theories of Bicycle Repair” and then you showed up to class with a wrench and some spare tires and they handed you a book about how to fix a bicycle. And you’re all like, “Well that’s cool, but I had to walk here because my bicycle needs fixed” and then for the rest of the semester you talked about different ways to fix a bicycle and people were saying things like, “In Wilbur Wright’s essay about bicycle repair he said that before you can fix a bicycle you have to understand what sort of bicycle you are fixing, so let’s spend a couple hours talking about different types of bicycles” and you’re all like, “Well that’s cool, but I have to walk home later because my bicycle is still broken” and everybody was like, “Yeah, but is it really broken? It is still a bike, right?” and then you’re all like, “Well yeah, but …” and then they’re all like, “Maybe you just aren’t appreciating the multitude of possibilities of what a bike can be? Maybe you have an ideological bias about what a bicycle is supposed to do. Why are you oppressing the liminal potentialities of what a bicycles can be? Did you ever think of that?” and then class is over and you walk home.

This is an unfair characterization. I actually love the class and I enjoy the people in it and I like the reading. That being said, the nature of the class is that it is about how to repair a bicycle, not about repairing a bicycle.

For the sake of clarity I should mention that a Theories of Fiction class is different than a Critical Theories of Literature class (which I have talked about on here before). A Critical Theories of Literature class is more like a history of intellectual thinking as it relates to literature. Critical Theories also tends to be one of the hardest classes any English major has to take, but it is invaluable to me as a writer and as a person, primarily because it requires one to rapidly move between different modes of thought. One week you will work your ass off trying to understand one way of thinking (say Structuralism) and when you finally get it you say, “This is fucking great! I totally get it and I think I am a Structuralist now!” and then the very next week you will have to work your ass off trying to understand a way of thinking which is actively diametrically opposed to the way you just learned to think (say Deconstruction vs. Structuralism) and you end up saying, “Wait, I also understand this! I now renounces my Structuralist past! I am a Deconstructionist now!” then a week later you end up being something else.

The end result of all this a sort of wonderful elasticity of the mind, known in most other disciplines as “Schizophrenia”.

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