letter to a student

Answering some questions from a young writer headed to college:

. . . I definitely would discourage getting a degree in writing.  Too wishy-washy.  Writers ought to use college to learn stuff to write about.  Classics is perfect.  What you learn studying the ancients is applicable everywhere, and knowing Latin and/or Greek sets you apart nowadays.  (Used to be common, when it was generally required.  I was right on the cusp of that – my brother was a year ahead of me in public school, and he had to take Latin.  When I got to the ninth grade I was allowed the option of General Science, and jumped at it.  A pity, because a curious kid picks up science everywhere.  You don't just stumble onto Cicero and Virgil, though.)

The question "What do you do if/when you are roughly halfway through a novel and discover the plot could have gone in a totally different direction, and your fresh idea appeals to you more than the original?" is interesting because it has happened to me in many novels.  I always abandon the original idea and follow the new one.  (Unless a book is "work done for hire," where the person with the paycheck has already okayed a specific plot.)

I wrote to the Iowa Writers Workshop and sent along a copy of my first novel (not sf), saying "I want to write for a living, and if you give me a teaching assistantship (plus the GI Bill) I can go for two years without getting a job."  They signed me on, and that's what I did.  In fact, I was pulling down three or four hundred dollars a month (when rent was $100) from short stories in the sf magazines.  So we were pretty rich by graduate-school standards.  (They would never have accepted me if they'd known I was a, gasp, science fiction writer.)

What I meant by the "invisible cage" metaphor is that the pursuit of writing for money does put restraints on how experimental your work can be, but after you've been doing it for some years, you no longer notice the restraints.

You should follow your own star.  I had to stay in school because I knew that I would be drafted and sent to Vietnam as soon as I graduated.  I might have learned more with a library card and free time.  (Of course the caveat to that is that there are really useful things that you would never try if not for the demands of curriculum.  In my case, differential equations and advanced symbolic logic.)

Good luck

Joe Haldeman