To quit or not to quit
It's one of the days I feel like calling it quits.
Why am I still writing fanfic? Why am I still doing it when the landscape has changed so much over the years and I'm prolly the last one of my old writer gang still around. I can't recognize--or appreciate--the art much nowadays (Do people not proofread before they publish? Do people even know what constitutes a paragraph? Or an enjambment? Or what using excessive adjectives takes away?); I for sure am not a fan of its current state of readership ( silent readers. harrasers. all the omgs and wows.); and I'm beginning to think writing fanfic is akin to self-flagellation. I'm far removed from its academic bulwark, which used to nourish me; I no longer am part of any writing groups, which have raised me since Yahoo Groups and LiveJournal; and the self-rewarding joy is fleeting compared to the disappointment of finding no growth in the environment of mediocrity.
In one of his workshop, I remember Michael Martone said that one of his criteria of being a successful teacher was that if he could find his students--or even if it's just one student--still writing ten or twenty years after workshop. I get it now, Mike, boy do I get it.
Am I to call it quits?
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