Creative writing considered as an industry

To some extent it's an easy target, but I really am concerned that a fair number of young writers will never hear that there are other paths to being a writer than the cloister of a university creative writing department.

For the record, I did spend a short time in that world as an undergraduate, and thought it was the cat's pajamas for a while. I was fortunate enough to escape into magazines.

The quality of the class then depends to a large part on the quality and investment of your classmates and intructor. It can be wonderful or miserable or vary from week to week.

The one thing it can't be, at least in my experience, is an environment wherein play and genre experimentation go down well. And this is how it contributes to a homogenization: generally, well-crafted, "realistic," New Yorker/Story type fiction is held as the standard. Forget like pomo experimentation and fantasy trilogies or writing as a fun pastime--it's a craft you as a professional hone to demonstrate your mastery of current fashion.

I wrote a long essay about this kind of fiction as the genre that denies it's a genre -- "litfic," I called it -- for the Chicago Reader a couple-few years ago if anyone wants to be e-mailed a copy.

I've sort of come to consider "literary fiction" a useless and misleading classification...too often there's no actual literature in it, just as there's no milk in a "shake" at McDonald's...

Also, since it was a university degree (vs a diploma or 'course'), one had to take non-writing classes, which rounded the education out, gave varying perspectives, etc.) I also managed to do a co-op program, so I was writing poetry but also working in 'communications' and journalism. Maybe I was lucky, or maybe I just saw that one has to stay practical/realistic with such a program - university wasn't an escape or a break from the 'real world', but it did give me the space/time to write and read and think about writing, which might not have a happened (to the same extent) had I done a different degree (eegh, like my orig choice - biology/premed) or worked.

I could go on and on, arguing both sides, but hey.

I also managed to do a co-op program, so I was writing poetry but also working in 'communications' and journalism.

That addresses one of my objections to the current situation: IME there is plenty taught about how to run the business side of writing (submissions, queries, copyright, etc.), but the economics of the endeavor is the elephant in the room that few will speak of.

The truth is that most of the people employed in the CWIC are employed as teachers of it. So they would naturally tend to obscure the role that the teaching itself plays in their ability to make a living. I'll wager that most teach because they have to, not merely out of love of teaching or a desire to pass on their wisdom. It's natural for them to want to downplay the fact that teaching is their main source of income, their benefits, their job security. But they're not, by and large, there to teach pedagogy--they're there to teach writing.

And writing, as practiced by those in the CWIC, is not a money-making proposition. Cheerful old Writer's Digest will not tell you that. Sure, a novelist can make $20,000 in a year--but that's for five years' worth of work. Sure, you can sell a short story for $2,000 (pre-tax), but how many writers will be able to do that 50 times a year?

In contrast, writers who are willing to whore their golden talent for filthy lucre--writers like, well, me--can live quite comfortably. Trade magazines. Association newsletters. Press releases. Business proposals. Government brochures. Ads for pharmaceuticals. This is how I've paid the bills for the past decade. But the willingness to do this sort of thing is low on the part of the CW students I've known.

you seei think that ilb should be to the new yorker what ilm is to the village voice. that is, we each submit and publish fictions with the magazine until we are known as a collective of supertalented writers. that obviously has certain benefits common to all collectives.

it is surely not that hard to get published in the new yorker. have you seen some of the stuff in there? i could write it with my toes.

the swilling seas shared the dawn with the seagulls.

not many people can write a sentence like that.

now multiply that by several thousand, add a watertight plot with more hooks than an early beatles single (or a uh, im thinking of some kind of fish-catching mechanism with lots of hooks, one of those if they exist and i don't see why not), and some incredible insights into this twisted society we live in and well, you can see where i'm coming from, it's a given. i just need to put it in the mail baby. BOOK IT.

How about:

The seas were swilling. They swilled with weary ennui. Even though they shared the dawn with the seagulls, they didn't really love the seagulls. In fact, nobody loves anybody. The seagulls lit another cigarette and said, "I'm so bored with the sea."

the swilling seas shared the dawn with the sunlit seagulls. look at all those s's. you know what they call that. silibancy. silabincy. sibilancy. sibalant, sibilant. silibant? sibilant. silibancy. er sibilancy. right, sibalancy. i don't know. it's funny though, when you think about the s sounds, and the s sounds. very clever, that word.

i can write these gorgeous sentences at will. here is another for you all to cherish:

the compaq hummed in the harsh-lit room.

that sentence is simply bursting with potential. i love it.

post-it notes lay scattered about the cluttered desk like landmines in a field of paper-death.

They're sticklers over at the New Yorker.

the pen's tip, blackink-spotted metallic, gleamed under the white lights.

now wait until you see what's coming next. it will throw you for a loop my firends.

Further derailing of a once-interesting thread? (xpost)

just a min im cookin up somethin and it smells GOOD.

I'm just not sure that your analogy works. I'm not sure The Voice:music journalism::The New Yorker:short stories. But either way, ILB was not started as a place for short story writers to hang out. (Thank goodness.)

glass shattered two floors down as black death ambled, slightly tubby, into the dawning fray.

I can't speak to how poetry is taught, but my impression as regards prose is that focusing on style or language itself is out of fashion. Caring about words = writing self-consciously literary prose = writing prose that "calls attention to itself" = breaking the "vivid and continuous dream." All these are sins under the Gardnerian worldview. The focus has to be on character and plot and theme.

You can care about language in grade school, and you can go back to caring about it in grad school, but in the undergraduate world it's the province of the linguistics department.

Well, in defense of the Gardnerian position, a lot of 19-year olds take a few bong hits and write everything that comes to mind into a notebook and call it "stream of consciousness." Doesn't make it art. Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner got away with it by being genuises, basically. Try telling a 19-year-old with a few bong hits in him that he's not a genius; you won't get very far.

Better to tell them to focus on following the rules before they try to break them.

If you look at the poetry published in small magazines, you soon see that editors, too, are weak in these areas. It has always been thus, so far as I know.

One of the major difficulties is that there are no theories of prosody that are as well accepted as, for example, color theory. One of the lasting side effects of the modernist rebellion against rhyme and meter has been that even such theories as once existed are now discredited and largely forgotten. Even then, what usually passed for theories were largely canons of taste.

The best thing you can do is read constantly, recognize what works, collect a personal anthology and do your own analysis of the elements in individual poems you find to be effective. This at least trains you to reject your own weaker efforts and gives you a tenetive understanding of what they lacked. It can't make you write good lines, but it can let you test what you write to see how it breaks.

Every good poet eventually strikes out into territory where theory falters and the only reliable guide is some shadow of Virgil who accompanies and advises you.

hee that tickles!

I remember reading some Vonnegut interview or quote in which he defended workshops, saying that when they're really good -- when you're surrounded by other gifted writers -- they perform a similar role to that of a great editor.

Aimless: I'm not so sure it's a full-blown "theory of prosody" (or rhyme, or whatever) that I'd be interested in, but, you know, at least an investigation of different types of rhyme and how they've been used, a dissection of works by these physical qualities, etc.

(Perhaps this is why so much of what is called poetry these days reads like tepid enjambed prose? Well, OK, probably not.)

the thought of majoring in, not poetry, but poetry-writing, is kind of incredible. possibly in a bad way.

People get MFAs in poetry-writing all the time, of course.

(The thought of me being the PR person for a short-fiction machine is pretty great. Playing to my strengths, there!)

The aesthetic that emerges in many in them, though, does tend to discourage experimental writing. Which is not to say that no good or unusual writing will come out of them--just that it seems to be a lot easier to get praise in a workshop for a sensitive mood piece about demiurban neurotic people who don't really love each other. As opposed to, say, a story where a woman believes that she is a toaster oven.

Hence the pervasive sense that there is a type of story that can be called "workshoppy."

I disagree with a lot of things said here but I feel like I've fallen into some weird ILX role as the defender of studying creative writing, and it's not a role I particularly relish. That said, what's with this weird idea that Iowa (aka "the only writing program I've heard of") is the only thing going? It's arguable whether it's good at all, depending on what kind of writer you are.

I don't think anyone who understands writing would say that it does not require study. It requires study in depth.

The difficulty I identify with programs is that they tend to be programmatic. This is not bad in itself, it simply increases the chances that the particular program of study that you may find yourself in may be ill-conceived or ill-taught, or it may simply be designed to solve a set of problems not central to your own needs, or it may ignore information that would be of greater value to you in favor of information of lesser value.

It was my own experience that learning to write at a high level was a process that was greatly aided by self-motivation and self-direction. By setting my own problems and exercises, I could direct my learning to the problems that seemed most important to solve. By constantly addressing issues of personal importance, I never found motivation to be a problem. I put in very long hours very happily. I never felt like my efforts were a waste or a formality or an imposition. I very much doubt I would have had similar feelings in any formal program. I could be wrong there.

However much I might have learned from more formal instruction and direction, it is my belief that I learned all of this and more by harnessing my own drive and ambition directly. Without the opportunity to select my own direction as I thought most pertinent, I could not have been as motivated as I was.

Just like physics, there are no secrets in writing that are not open secrets, accessible to anyone practised in the craft. The way to become practised in the craft is to ask the right questions, experiment and think hard about the results.

I didn't mean to suggest that it's "the only thing going." Only that I get the sense that if you're not going to go to a top-notch program, then why bother. There might be five or ten or twenty good programs. I don't really know.

If the writer continues to improve over time, they learn to harness the obsession and create something lasting, but maybe there is something of value, something uniquely personal, that can only be developed by writing badly or extravagantly first? If for no other reason than to realize that that's not what they want to write anymore.

I've never participated in a creative writing workshop, so I can't speak from experience, but it seems like Proust would have gotten shot down for being too purple in his prose, too longwinded, too obsessive in his exploration of certain themes.

proust, faulkner, woolf, joyce, pynchon etc etc could write like that. you can't. you are not as smart as they, bong-smoke.

jeffrey archer, with a twist of lyme-barr disease, is your ideal idol.

While I didn't find that they were enforcing adherence to strict rules, I will say that the emphasis tends to fall more on the craft of writing rather than the art of it. However, many--perhaps most when first entering--NEED this for their writing to improve. They've never really picked apart prose to find out how it works and how to make it work for themselves. I still don't consider myself a particularly good writer, but when I look at the crap I was producing before I went in the program...wow. The difference is striking.

I think you're way off base about the economics issue, though. No one in my program really thought they could support themselves by writing, and most of us were there because we wanted to learn how to write better, not because it's going to make us a million dollars. We were also all aware that the average span of time between graduation and publication of your first novel is approx. 10 years. So even those who hoped to make some money knew it would happen right away. Michael Chabon is the exception, not the rule.

The instructors--all of whom were also working writers, needing their teaching job to supplement their income--were also realistic about this. Particularly when talking to the poets and short story writers. By and large, poetry doesn't sell. For every Billy Collins in the world who does sell, there are dozens that don't. Short stories may get picked up in small magazines but it's not going to bring you anything but satisfaction. In addition, short story collections don't sell, so good luck even trying to get one published if you don't also have a novel.

And it was never pitched to us that the only way to get work publish was to join an MFA program. If anything, we were probably told that serendipity has as much to do with it as talent.

(Thousands.)

-- opalescent knee

This is an all too tempting and easy way to dismiss Nabokov when you start. I'd give it some time -- at least finish one of his novels.

Here's another wrinkle in can-they-teach-me: I'm giving up my day job as a proofreader and freelance writer to return to school at the age of 30 to finally finish my bachelor's in French and classics. When I registered for class on Friday I found that the new school requires me to take 2 semesters of freshman comp, and refuses to accept my English work at my old school -- where I was an English major, with concentration in creative writing, and tested out of composition -- as a substitute. So I have to pay, now, for writing classes designed for eighteen-year-olds with no interest in the literary arts. Then again, the book-and-music journalism I've been doing for money isn't exactly academic writing, which I've admittedly never really studied. Half of me thinks this will be really valuable and half of me wants to go into the English department (which, according to the registration office, won't let people test out of its comp classes) with a machete. Is the school doing me a favor or stealing my time?

Hurting, I would perhaps argue that if you're going to like Nabokov, you're going to like him because he's a showy, distracting jerk. It's not the only thing you can get out of him, sure, but you have to put up with so much of it to get it out of him that you are better off seeking your thrills elsewhere if you don't like the showiness.

Well, that's a strange way to put it. I do think one of the reasons to enjoy Nabokov is his dazzling mastery of the English language, but calling him a "showy distracting jerk" makes him sound like some kind of literary Yngwie Malmstein.

Imagine if I were to pick up a Hemmingway novel, never having read Hemmingway, and after 30-50 pages put it down and said "This guy needs to learn how to describe things."

Rather than a machete, go to a prof in the English departmant and see if there is a loophole you can wriggle through. Don't ask admissions or any office mandated to evaluate transfered credits or such like. They will not help you.

I know that when I went into history it took some banging into various walls to get a handle on what ppl. were looking for. But my best instruction came from reading collections of articles by good foax and in solid disciplinary journals. I'm sure given yr. background and resume you can find an understanding professor on this count.

And Lefty's post was heartening--I'm glad to hear that realism about career prospects is worked into CW programs.

I agree with whoever said that the bits in Nabokov that some call "showy" and "distracting" are actually some of the best parts. He's derided by John Gardner and that ilk as constantly peeping into the text and saying "look out! here comes a metaphor!" --but that's where a lot of the fun in Nabokov lies.

What would be wrong with that?

1. it actually adheres to a set of aesthetic principles that are in fact rather rigid and anti-experimental. People love to think this about creative writing courses, but for the most part it’s not true at all. It’s not true, ironically enough, because people love to think it: the whole accusation just gives teachers all the more reason to be more self-consciously sensitive to people idiosyncrasies. At schools like Columbia and Brown you see more failed, stylized experiments than anything else.

The core of truth here is that yes, writing courses teach you Proper, Traditional Craft. But like Chris points out: what’s wrong with that? In what school does anyone teach anyone anything but the classic tools of a trade? Nobody goes into a creative writing program to develop his solitary, idiosyncratic genius; you go to learn how to make a piece of writing work. You don’t go to learn about style so much as to learn about craft: all of the mundane moving parts—pacing, balance of information, intonation—that readers probably won’t even notice. Yeah, it’s funny to joke about people workshopping Joyce, or Proust. But the fact is that no matter how much raw talent or style a person might have, there is no one, Hemingway included, who doesn’t need to learn about craft; a workshop just helps you figure that stuff out a lot more quickly than you would at home. (You’d be amazed how much of workshop is about figuring out basic matters of how to communicate with your reader; amazed how many sessions start out with people not realizing that, I dunno, a character was meant to be a ghost, or something, because the sentence that revealed it was buried in the wrong place; amazed how many perfectly-great writers think they’ve made something clear when they really, really haven’t.)

2. It is not honest with its recruits about the economics of the endeavor. This is actually another one where the programs overcompensate: there’s a point where you start to feel like a whole lot of your time is spent being reminded that writing is hard, damn hard, and thankless. It’s true: in a realistic world there would be a tenth of the writing students that there currently are in the U.S. But I don’t think the programs are luring those extra kids in with TV ads promising massive book deals. Most people know exactly what they’re getting into. As you work your way down into less selective realms—all those contests and things advertised in the back of writing magazines—well, yeah, that’s when people start taking advantage of your grandma and the memoir she’s always thought about writing.

3. It doesn't seem to be able to live very far outside college campuses. Oh god no! I’d have thought you’d have pointed this criticism in the other direction: the Industry has arms everywhere. Look at the number of writers’ magazines in your local bookstores; look at the number of community writing workshops in most cities; look at the programs taking creative writing to inner-city kids, or people in retirement homes. The whole practice actually has some of its best moments outside of campuses—not as a prep for writing literary fiction, but as a way of, say, helping kids deal with themselves, or giving people the personal satisfaction of having written something. (It’s bad and it’s kind of sad but at least maybe one day their grandkids will read it.)

4. It is insecure about its relevance, so it artificially inflates it while declaring it a pity that it is not more important. A writing workshop would ask you to provide examples here, because your point seems vague and flimsy: how does it artificially inflate itself? At the MFOscars? When does it complain about not being more important?

5. It is the snake which eateth its own tail. … It appears to mostly be engaged in feeding itself. Except but seriously: couldn’t you say this about any number of fields in the arts and humanities? Yeah, poetry feeds itself on a really scary, feeble level—but then so does ballet, another endangered art form. The weird thing with writing is that it’s not endangered at all—reading is endangered, maybe, but just about everybody thinks they can write something.

So if there’s a problem, I’d point to that. There’s a bit in Kundera’s Book of Laugher and Forgetting (this is the crap translation, I think): “Graphomania … takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: 1. a high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; 2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; 3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. … But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.”

The Industry here only feeds that—MFA programs for the young people who think they can do it, writers’ mags and read-your-manuscript scams for the old people who decide their lives are interesting enough to deserve a memoir. And yeah, it’s a little creepy, but I don’t understand how bits of ILX get so consistently worked up about it. The site that worked so hard to purge itself of rockism in the musical sense turns out to be nothing but rockist when it comes to literature: suddenly it’s all about authentic voices, untouched by actually studying and trying to become better at what they do?

um i dunno i've mostly ignored this thread but seems to me most everyone nowadays has studied, usually in some official manner, the art before engaging in it on a vast scale.

at the same time i find it difficult to believe it was essential to their development, or is now. but then i don't really believe in schooling's ability to impart any special knowledge, but - then - again - that's solely based on my --- rather limited --- experience.

Can you imagine a film studies program that was built entirely around workshops, though?

http://www.poets.org/poems/prose.cfm?prmID=3333&CFID=30694304&CFTOKEN=64179148

Lots of the essays are in his lovely collection "Breakfast Served Any Time All Day"

What would be wrong with that?

-- Casuistry (chri...), March 21st, 2005.

Well, there wouldn't be anything wrong with having a distaste for terse prose, but that's not the same thing as saying Hemingway doesn't know how to write well (which is what calling Nabokov a "showy distracting jerk" means). Hemingway and Nabokov were both going for certain effects and developing certain techniques, and they very much knew what they were doing.

But then I've been known to buy books or albums because they got a bad review wherein qualities were derided that made me suspect I'd like them.

I should say that the first post was Way Cranky and in retrospect I would have toned it down or perhaps not posted it at all (but what fun would that be?). I think I was also conflating the commercial "let the novelist inside you OUT" books with creative writing as it is taught at a graduate level.

Most of nabisco's points are fair ones. A few points of clarification:

About aesthetic rigidity: It is heartening to hear that teachers work to overcome for this impression. And I acknowledge that students can put out frightfully bad failed experiments (I did enough of such, in my time). My main beef is, then, not with CW programs but with one specific aspect of the Gardner/Lodge aesthetic--mainly that "the writing shouldn't call attention to itself." That does make it pretty frankly opposed to metafiction and to authors having narratological fun (cf. Nabokov).

I'm afraid a lot of beginning writers read these maxims in On Becoming a Boring Novelist, then see them amplified in Writer's Digest and a million self-helpy-type books. They may come away with the notion that there is that one path to Good Fiction. But I'll grant that probably doesn't apply to someone who gets as far as an MFA program.

The point about a residue of self-importance stems mainly from conversations with the Artsy Crowd where I went to school. "Oh, how I wish our crass, materialistic society placed more emphasis on the arts..." That sort of thing.

SJ Lefty did a fine rebuttal of the economic stuff, which is conceded. I will say that among people who want to be professional writers--even some who are talented enough and driven enough--there are differences of opinion about how to make ends meet. IME, selling one article or one book at a time is a very very difficult way to survive. So I spend a lot of time telling people that they might be better off salaried, or working as a contractor--even if it means doing non-bylined business-to-business writing or association newsletters.

And as for feeding itself--well, "everybody does it" isn't much of a defense. I'm just as annoyed by the way the art world does that, or classical music, or ballet.

It's just that writing has such great potential to reach a wider audience and talk to them about their lives. Much as I dig metafiction, the subject matter of most literature is life--it can hit you where you live in the way that Brahms or Delacroix rarely does. I mean, people read Uncle Tom's Cabin and it contributed to the start of a freakin war. So why are so many good creative writers tacitly encouraged to mostly write for each other?

Sorry, the whole Hemingway thing was a tangent and I didn't mean to suggest anything about workshops by it. I was using it as an analogy for why it's wrong to immediately dismiss Nabokov (on having just started the first novel one has ever read by him) because of his "showy language" or whatever.

I’ve never seen anyone on ILX get skeptical about people going to film school, or studying dance, or anything like that—because it’s understood that these are crafts where a person benefits from study. To imagine that writing is any different is sheer romanticism...

I agree and as I've said, I am solidly for study and training. Heck, I'm a craft whore.

About the gender-dynamic. I have never been in a workshop run by a male. The three run by females I've attended wouldn't even consider anything remotely "generic": horror, fantasy, sci-fi. The published stuff they gave us to read was all weepy angsty upper middle class bullshit lit. This is potentially a sexist question but: those of you who know, is it any different when dudes run things?

I on the other hand prefer to write my poems the morning before the Open Reading—and mention that before reading, proof they don't have any mold on them.

Another point that Hall made about the assigned writing exercises—have those "Write a poem from the point of view of your unborn child..." ever produced anything good? Maybe... but the idea that there are shortcuts and easy techniques to Access Your Creativity that everyone can use is pure snake oil. And I should know; I used them all the time while teaching kids. On THEM they work great.

i didn't mean to undercut what you were saying, by the way. those posts were pretty great. the one thing though that bugs me about the workshop genre is its propensity to take itself so seriously, as the teloic city upon the hill toward which benighted fiction has advanced o so achingly. that's so american. historically (beginning with the iliad, in fact) most great literature has been extremely playful, raging against the status quo, whereas your lorrie moores et al. seem to me to reinforce it, or at least celebrate as sophisticated an ironic resignment. exquisitely crafted fiction is a pleasure to read, don't get me wrong, but so is roger zelazny (who's no slouch, i might add), who i doubt gets much play at iowa or brown.

I think what I object to is this idea that workshops would somehow reject and fight against forms of writing that would be well-liked by readers in general. The people in workshops are readers, pretty much; it’s pure weird egotism to imagine that you’d “get” and enjoy forms of writing that your counterparts in MFA programs somehow wouldn’t. I mean, good lord, there are like ten people in the room: if someone writes something that’s working, in any way imaginable, it’s pretty much going to get support from a quorum, you know?

(And yeah, I know, I suppose there’s always the possibility that some writer could have a bunch of really failed and irritating techniques now, ones that everyone would tell him to give up on because they’re clearly sucking, even though maybe if left alone he’d keep at it and finally work out what he was doing and make it work in some wonderful idiosyncratic way—but what the hell is this, a movie? C’mon. Besides, anyone with a grand genius idiosyncrasy is going to keep pushing on toward it; he’s not going to let a couple groans from the workshop dissuade him. Which is maybe another thing I’m not stressing properly: do you have any idea how little the feedback you get from workshop affects your style? I mean, you check if people understood stuff, and if your pacing seemed to work, and stuff like that—you use them as lab rats, basically, and check that they moved through your little fiction maze in the way you wanted them to—but hell, if they have problems with your style, well, most people just go drinking with their friends and talk shit about whoever isn’t into their tics. The only people who sit around striving to meet the workshop’s demands are, well, either people who recognize that the workshop is right about them, or people who have nothing in particular that they’re driven to accomplish anyway, not for the moment, and are just trying to see how many people they can please.) (And that latter’s not a bad bit of “craft” to pick up, either.)

1) the portrait of america that contemporary naturalists paint, in comparison to my experience, is unnatural, and
2) a predominance of the privileged writing about their lives serves to establish norms that lazy workshops might bandy about as self-evident rules of naturalism

and uninteresting in general because we all know it's been mostly the well-to-do that have been our artists, at least until the 20th century, so, if you like art, why complain?

which in a sense, if you're still following this, brings me back to my original point--aren't precisely the people too thin-skinned (maybe too little confident?) ever to consider workshops what the start of the art could most use to shake things up? that's more of a rhetorical question than anything, really, as will this one probably end up being, since how do you draft the terminally shy into writing programs when so many little egotistical would-be jonathon franzens are fighting to get in and live the life?

He's also not opposing workshops per se, but the culture of poetry writing that enstructures them.

& again there are places where fiction should just *work* in a way that isn't the case with poetry -- there are just ways to get things *done* in fiction that ppl. need to work out and be attentive to, while the best poetry is usually empty of such moments.

(McManhire!)

peaches dropped from the orchard's trees like gifts from the necterous bounty of olympus.

our first battle may as well be fought man to man.

since you have come late to the scene i will choose the weapons.

i select: a sentence duel.

as you can see i have already demonstrated, throughout this thread, the format. but, i will let you fire the first shot here.

the rest of ilb shall serve as both witness and ultimate judge.

we will each write five sentences, you-me you-me etc, or, if you would prefer, alternating order, and ilb shall determine the winner in each case, who is awarded a point. highest score wins.

let us begin.

Nabisco, of course, can write all of his sentences taking the piss out of whomever he chooses, or not, as fancy dictates. Or ignore the challenge altogether as any gentleman would.