One of the Guys

[cathschaffstump]

caveat: I’m not a guy. Nor am I trying to be sexist by using the term “one of the guys.” I’m using a term from our culture than indicates a casual sense of belonging. And that’s all. –CMSS

How big was the town you grew up in? I come from third-world Iowa, a town of (then 703) people. And frankly, I was the weird kid. Weird for lots of reasons. Rest assured, this isn’t an essay about my family dysfunction or my backwardness. What this is about is my writing. You knew it would be.

If you come from a small town, and you are mildly talented, I think your talent may well be blown out of proportion. I was bright, but I thought I was a genius because we didn’t have a lot of bright hanging around in third-world Iowa. I was multi-talented, but, depending on the day, I thought I was a diva, an Academy award winner, or even Dostoyevsky. There are people in the world that have more talent than me. I’m willing to concede that now. Even in writing.

My ego was bolstered by a lot of fake A’s from high school English teachers who were happy anyone would write in abundance at all, grammatically or otherwise. Luckily, my high school started sending me to the local community college once a week. I was bored and there was no TAG in rural Iowa then. There I met George, who taught me that red marks on my stories were a valuable thing.

But this isn’t about my mentor George. God bless George, but no. It’s about the fact that deep down, I think many writers believe that our writing is special and unique. This may be peculiar to me, because I was bought up in the small town of Ignorant Conceit (which is on the map in Iowa, really).

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Originally published at Writer Tamago. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[kurtoons.livejournal.com]

Why do I have a desire to send a link of this to Doug?

No, that would be a bad idea. He'd miss the point and latch onto something irrelevant like how unfair it was that you got support when you were an angstful teenager and he never did. Those damn clique-y fanboys and those mean ol' fascist hippies.

And I really don't want to risk putting you in contact with Doug. That's the last thing you deserve.