Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Okay, so maybe I'm just overly feminist but I really believe that all characters should have more to them then just to serve the purpose of making another character change something about their ways.
In my fiction class today, we read a boy's short story in which he had such a character. A man moves to a new city, and he is naive about many things. He meets a pretty girl, and basically just from meeting this girl decides to change his life.
I don't buy that. And I told him so. But that he replied something along the lines of, "I feel like most guys do that." And my professor (who is a woman, by the way) agreed. Which really annoyed me. This girl should at least be using the guy for something in her life too. She shouldn't just be pretty and fun.
The female character he wrote is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Many movies I love have characters like this. Zooey Deschanel basically is one in real life. Wikipedia tells me that the MPDG is "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."

Why is this okay? How can a whole class of writers accept this? Maybe, I've grown to be too big of a feminist but I really believe all the characters should have their own purpose not just the purpose of making someone else's purpose.

"Tears stream down your face"

I don't believe that anyone goes to class ever expecting to cry. Let alone have the whole class break out into tears. Men and women sobbing, leaving the room, wiping their cheeks, hiding in their hands. That's not something you expect from a class.

But today, that's what happened in my honors creative writing class.

My professor, the week before this class told us to write down what we want to say in our poetry. We all wrote things like "the truth", "experience", and all that other cliche stuff you say to not say what you actually want to say. He made us get more specific, and I wrote down about a moment in my life that I think of every once and a while that haunts me. He told us to write about those things in our poems due the next week.

Everyone's poems were decent, and they didn't specifically acknowledge anything in the author's life. Even mine, though a story (because I'm a fiction writer) didn't acknowledge my true feelings about the subject of the poem. But my professor asked everyone to talk about what their poem was really about. Each member of my small class talked about personal issues in their lives and many cried.

I think a lot of the students were turned off by the class, now feeling hesitant to write about things so personal, but for me it only made my love of writing grow stronger. I felt connected the kids in the class, the kids that I still don't remember all the names of. I truly believe crying about these poems is going to turn them into better and more meaningful poems.

Guess I will find out next week!

Inspire me.

I believe I've mentioned in a previous post, but I'll mention again that I need inspiration to write. I'm not the kind of writer who just writes randomly for hours. I like to wait until I have something I want to write about.
That flaw or whatever it may be considered has been worrying me for this upcoming quarter. I'm taking three workshop classes, so I'm going to need a lot of inspiration.
Fortunately, I already found some. It was simple, actually. I don't want to post all about my short story here, but I want to share my love of waiting for inspiration.
Waiting makes me feel unburdened by my writing, and the words flow out. I think my characters sound more real, and I think my story is going to be funny. And I'm not great at funny.
Hopefully, I keep getting inspired. Especially for my poetry workshops. Poetry writing is my greatest flaw in being a writer. I just don't have poetry in my poetry. Not to make myself sound amazing but I feel I often have poetry in my fiction, but not in actual poems.

Certainly, uncertain.

A lot of people I know who are Creative Writing Majors, including my TA's, and professors always talk about how much they write. They wrote this the other night, and that this morning. Hearing them talk about how often they work always worries me as a writer. It worries me because I don't work like that. I don't just write all the time. I'm not working on anything really. Maybe my stories for class, and sometimes I journal (and I try to write in this blog). But I don't sit around just writing.

I wish I did because hearing them talk about it and realizing I don't do what they do makes me feel like maybe I'm not meant to be a writer. I always sort of knew that, even in declaring my major. I don't expect to behind a laptop in a coffee shop all day long making money. I still don't know what I'm going to do when I graduate. I want to be around literature, and around writers. I know that much.

Sometimes, I say that I have to wait for "inspiration" in order to start working on something. I guess that is true in some ways. Once I got inspiration for a short story in my fiction workshop this past quarter, and I think that story is the best thing I've written to date. I want that to happen again, and I also want to continue editing that story. But am I editing that story? No. I'm watching television, and organizing my apartment. Does that make me a writer? Probably not.

It's too late to change my major, and I don't want to. Maybe I'm not meant to be a writer. Maybe I'm just different than the other writers I know. Maybe watching television, organizing my closet, and scrolling through tumblr is my way of writing. Maybe, I still really don't know.