I came to the realization, a few months ago, that I wasted my entire education. I had known that I wasted grade school, high school, and college (I wasted grade school because I didn’t want the other kids to know I already knew all the answers. I wasted high school because I hated being at an all boys prep-school. And I wasted college because I was always wasted) but what I hadn’t known was that I had also wasted graduate school.
This realization came to me after I got World Leader Pretend published. After all those years of thankless work, I finally had a book out, and I wanted, more than anything, to hear people talking about the ideas behind the book: how the Internet formed all these international communities, and how simulataneously cool and scary that was. But what I got instead was critiques of the writing–this was good; this bugged me; this made me laugh, etc.–all the same crap I got before it was published.
I wanted to tell people that it was different now, that it didn’t matter.
But then suddenly I heard myself in all these voices, and I got really, really sad. I had spent all of graduate school reading all these books, and all this nascent writing by my classmates, and always all I had to talk about was the quality of the writing, rather than what it was that drove the writing.
Like I said, sad. In the end, does it matter whether writing is good or bad? We’re all out there trying to express ideas–trying to get people to see the world in a different light–and yet when it comes to someone else’s writing we stick our noses in the air and ignore what this other human being is trying to say.
Anyway, I’ve resolved to never critique anyone’s writing again. (Which I suppose eliminates the likelihood that I’ll ever be a college professor. I could never grade…)