Here's another reason I don't like web journals. I feel like I have to censor myself if I'm doing more than posting oddball stories or self-deprecating humor.

For instance, I'd love nothing more right now than to write about my frustration with teaching creative writing, but I can only do it in the most vague of terms (a practice I keep trying unsuccessfully to break my students of). Why? Because by now, many of my students know about this log and if I mention any of the idiotic, sappy, or horrible stories specifically, within hours of this posting, the author, along with everyone else in the class and quite a few other people outside the class including the administration, will hear about it. I could hurt someone's feelings and lose the trust of my students.

So what? one might ask. In the late 1920's Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner took to ruthlessly ridiculing each other's writing style and engendered a literary feud that even erupts from time to time in today's literary conferences and lit/comp classrooms all over the world. The two men never spoke to each other again, to my knowledge.

And these were mature adults.

Imagine if they had been in their late teens or early twenties.

It takes guts to open up and put yourself on paper. It takes blood and guts to actually allow another person to read it. If I were to ridicule some of these stories, the authors would believe, rightly to a certain extent, that I was ridiculing them. If this were an actual log instead of a virtual one, though, I could rant and rave and ridicule to my heart's content, and no one would be the wiser.

Of course, you could also make the case that these kids knowingly signed up for a course in creative writing, and they should expect to be critiqued harshly. Others could argue that at least a fourth of the class signed up because they thought it'd be an easy "A", and should therefore be stripped of that illusion with a good firm dose of reality tea.

No doubt both these arguments are valid, and I'd be the first one steeping the tea leaves if not for one thing.

I don't think I'm really frustrated with my students as much as I'm frustrated with myself.
I don't know how to give negative feedback positively to strangers. If they were my bosom pals, I could tell them their plots were about as twisted as a yardstick, their characters a s three-dimensional as a line and not quite as deep as bottle cap. Hell, as bosom friends, my students might even laugh and agree, but as post-adolescent young adults trying to appear suave and with-it in front of their fellow post-adolescent young adults, such brutal honesty cannot be swallowed smoothly.

My acerbic comments will be taken as condemnation of them, not their work, and writers with at least a glimpse of competency might shy away from ever writing again., and who knows where that will lead.

Before entering politics, Adolf Hitler fancied himself a passable painter (he wasn't half bad), and he tried to get into art school. They ridiculed his watercolors, turned him down, and he never put brush to canvas again. The rest is history.


My biggest problem, though, if I want to be truthful, is that I'm very good at pointing out crappy writing, but I suck at suggesting how it can be made better. Just because I'm a creative writer myself (and lately even that's debatable) doesn't mean I can teach others how to do it any more than I can teach a duck to roll its tongue.