/lit/ - Literature

>>6310087
>the friends you make are the sort of people that will immediately desert you if you express any sort of unorthodox opinion or question anything.

This is so fucking true.

Personal story time: I took an intro fiction course when I was first getting started and everyone in the class got along wonderfully. Everyone gave decent feedback and the professor did a good job facilitating conversations. Over the course of the semester we all got to know each other very well.

One of our last assignments was to write a very short story describing a tragic scene. Mine (which was admittedly not very good, but it was an intro class, so everyone sucked) was about a man watching police at a crime scene. A child had been run over, the mother was going batshit, and the man gradually reveals that not only could he have prevented it, but he chose not to and felt no guilt over it.

There was no discussion whatsoever about the story. Instead I was immediately attacked by everyone, the professor included, for writing something that they believed was cruel. Mind you, there was nothing "edgy" or graphic to the story, it was simply the man describing the scene and slowly revealing his role. Two fucking pages. I got a lot of "How could you do this" comments, and "This is just mean and hateful." One person actually worked themselves up so much screaming at me over how offensive it was, that she just started crying. All of this was happening over what was in actuality a very tame story. Seriously. I can not stress enough how vanilla this shit was.

I sat there and said nothing, so incredibly surprised by what had happened. One person in the class finally defended me, but they just started tearing into him instead.

Eventually I decided to go, and as I was doing so the professor began speaking to me as if they were forcing me to leave. As in it was their idea for me to leave and I was refusing.

To top it all off she refused credit for the assignment, which I decided to fight. She claimed that I was promoting violence against women. The department head read the story, saw nothing wrong with it, and I was given full credit for the assignment.

Luckily all we had left to do for the semester was hand in a portfolio of edited versions of everything we had written so I never had to go back. She gave me a shitty grade on the portfolio, and made it so that I was less than a point away from a B.

I never had any experiences this bad afterwards, but it did become apparent to me that many creative writing students and professors as well seem to have a difficult time separating the author from the work and feel the need to hold them responsible for the actions/thoughts of a character.

>>6138254
I would imagine he would be nowhere near as interesting in person. For every quip of his that gets thrown around today, there must have been hundreds that fell flat.

>>6138366 suggests he would tear you to pieces, but I would sooner guess that he would try way to hard to impress, turning everything said into some kind of joke to the point where you finally see through his bullshit and start wishing he would just fuck off.