"Well, Whatever, Nevermind"

--Nirvana

I'm sure I don't have appropriate expectations for community college writers. What exactly is good writing at this level? In my Creative Writing class, I was appalled by how awful the writing was for our next assignment, a short story (three to seven pages). One student, during peer review, wrote a short story about a guy hooking up with a girl at a dorm after a party (original, right?), but the weird part is--is in the first paragraph, the narrator explains that his father is a serial killer. Way out of left field. The story might be interesting if the son was contemplating the possibility of being just as cruel and merciless as his father, if genetics passed down a certain temperament and tendency towards violence. Or while he was being raised, he recalled certain behaviors from his father that made one suspicious that this man was a real psycho. If he experienced the trauma of abuse, and was eternally changed for the worst. None of that was touched upon. I was asked to review her story, and yet, I had nothing to say. I wanted to tell her to ditch the entire project, write something else, and please, god, go to the writing center on campus. The student had no idea to include line breaks during dialogue, and she also didn't know how to italicize for internal dialogue. And was quite fond of run-on sentences, without it adding to any poetic element.

One of the male students in my class at least had an authentic voice (I told him so after class, and encouraged him to develop it), he wrote about Latino gangs in the Central Valley (he was raised just thirty miles from where I was). I'm assuming with his name, he is also Latino. He had great insights into these young men because he works at a juvenile hall. At least, that was a particularly interesting topic. I told him (after class) that most people had no idea about that world, they only understand what they saw in the media. However, his mechanics of writing are behind, I would say, others his age and education level. He too didn't realize you needed line breaks for dialogue, and made other common grammatical errors--all of that you can train into a person, but voice? I don't believe learning to explore one's voice comes from the dry instruction of professors. You either have it or you don't.

Of course, it's easy to criticize. The student poked holes into my story, which was far from being finished. It was meant to be a snap shot into the life of my grandmother during her final year. The students realized that there wasn't much for want, obstacle, action or resolution (they complained mostly that the story had no point). One student told me to reduce my description to a couple of paragraphs, an idea that I find would be said by someone who mostly read dime novels and/or trashy, empty works. Another student (the Latino man) told me that the description was great and necessary. The same girl, who told me to gut my story, also said that my foreshadowing was too abrupt.

"But it's foreshadowing," I explain.

"Yeah, just make it more mysterious."

I thought about all this after I walked around campus to drop off some books in my car, and pick up others, and I ran into the English instructor, who was surrounded by a group of students. I walked past him without making eye contact. At least his criticism is useful.