January 13, 2002

4:05 PM

writingclasses.com"The largest private creative writing school in the United States" they claim. Everything is covered, yet nothing on weblogs. How is it possible.
posted by Voyageman (16 comments total)

I'm paticularly instersted in "Modern Theory on Copying Web Site Design of Companies That Can't Turn a Profit".
posted by geoff. at 4:09 PM on January 13, 2002

I'm confused. I can't find the book, music or movie section. And where's my shopping cart???
posted by fleener at 4:12 PM on January 13, 2002

I hear Steven Ambrose does guest lectures there.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 4:13 PM on January 13, 2002

I wonder if they put the TM in their logo or if they just didn't bother to erase it from the logo they copied.
posted by Ptrin at 4:22 PM on January 13, 2002

The Amazon-lifted design inspires me to go write something right now...
posted by stevis at 4:27 PM on January 13, 2002

I wonder if they encourage plagiarism in writing the way they do with web design.
posted by stevengarrity at 5:36 PM on January 13, 2002

Everything is covered, yet nothing on weblogs.

Blogs are sort of covered.
posted by KLAX at 6:47 PM on January 13, 2002

Note.. this isn't meant to be a troll, but you'll probably think it is anyway.

My answer.. because blogs are rather unimportant in the writing world right now. Sure, we might all think weblogs are the next big thing because one or two articles in the NYT say so, but I bet less than 0.1% of the world's population even knows what a 'weblog' is.

'blog' is even more unknown. I recently caught up with a group of about twenty experienced Internet users I knew a few years ago, none had even heard of Blogger.. and even the ones who had heard of 'weblogs' were using DiaryLand.

The simple fact is that weblogs, blogs, whatever.. are a tiny smudge on the Web. We can all hope that everyone on the planet will have a weblog in the future (hey, it'd be a cool!) but for now.. they are rather unimportant in the scheme of things.

Let's see if people are being taught about weblogs in classes in five years. Or will weblogs go the same way as the humble 'homepage' of 1994? I for one, despite my opinions in the post, really don't hope so.
posted by wackybrit at 8:59 PM on January 13, 2002

Most bloggers don't write, they just link to the same dumbass pages that everyone else is linking to that day. "Look at this test. It says I'm Worf. Har har har." That's a form of writing like the shopping list is a form of writing.
posted by pracowity at 11:47 PM on January 13, 2002

Excellent post pracowity, my first laugh of the day :-)
posted by wackybrit at 2:40 AM on January 14, 2002

This is a joke, right? Writing classes? I can write. What I've been looking for is an example of what makes a good spec proposal for a reality-based television show idea. I wanna pitch it to FOX cuz they'll buy anything, but I don't know how to write it. I mean I know how to write. I don't know the proper format. The industry seems to change what they accept every few weeks or months. I don't wanna pay to learn this. What happened to the days when one could just type a few words in a search engine and find obscure information like this? Also it doesn't matter how many classes someone takes. You still can't get anyone in tv or film to pay attention to you until after you pay for an agent. No one accepts unsolicited manuscripts. The whole industry is a joke, really. This writing website just looks like yet another attempt at taking advantage of suckers.
posted by ZachsMind at 3:40 AM on January 14, 2002

well i have a weblog, but i don't consider it writing at all. i put that on my main site. but if i was to have a 'single issue' weblog i think some writing tips would be very useful.
posted by quarsan at 4:05 AM on January 14, 2002

Let's see if people are being taught about weblogs in classes in five years.

I'm teaching about them and using them right now, in fact I'm going to use them pretty extensively for the first time in my journalism classes next quarter. (PS, if there are any other teachers out there using them, I'd love to hear from you.)
posted by willrich at 4:50 AM on January 14, 2002

willrich- wish you had been around when I was at school. good stuff.
posted by Voyageman at 5:18 AM on January 14, 2002

I love weblogs as much as the next person, maybe even more, but I'm not sure why they'd be taught at a creative writing school. Most blogs are non-fiction, creative writing is fiction. Of course it's possible to use the weblog format to write a novel or short stories, it's just not the way the format is most commonly used. It's not an issue of whether blogs are or aren't the next big thing, or whether old timers have or haven't heard of weblogs.
posted by megnut at 8:48 AM on January 14, 2002

Megnut, your comment just gave me a not-very-good idea for a fiction novel. Somewhere between Les Liaisons Dangereuses and E. but written across several weblogs. Fortunately I'll never have time to write it.
posted by walrus at 9:23 AM on January 14, 2002