The College Issue – Those Who Write, Teach – NYTimes.com

In the New York Times Sunday Magazine yesterday, David Gessner addresses the issue of writers who teach in order to make a living and asks:

What exactly does all this teaching do to our writing? And what, if anything, does it mean for a country to have a tenured literature?

He notes that some writers need their teaching jobs, not for the money, but for the structure it gives to too much free time:

Yet no matter how much support you have, how many schedules you make or how many books you’ve written before, there remains the basic irrationality of the task: you are sitting by yourself trying to make something out of nothing, and you rarely know where you’re going next.

One particular toll on the writer/teacher’s resources:

While the effect of teaching on writing may be a matter of debate, its effect on reading is undeniable. That is because there are only so many hours in the day, and those hours are used up reading our students’ work, which is, by definition, apprentice writing. Energy is finite while college students seemingly are not, and after teaching for a while you begin to feel as if you are in a “Star Trek” episode, lost on a strange planet made up of a thousand pods of need, all of them beaming out at you, sucking your energy, and all of them, invariably, asking you to read something. Since the reading life feeds the writing life, since we are what we eat, this can wear you down, to say the least.

Very interesting article. Do any writers/writing teachers out there care to comment?

From today’s Washington Post Sunday Magazine:

Illiterature: Can a computer judge fiction?
By Gene Weingarten
Sunday, September 21, 2008; Page W40

The ad on Craigslist was from an Oakton company called Zirdland.com. Zirdland claims it has developed a software system that can electronically analyze the quality and commercial viability of a work of fiction and prompt changes that will make it better.

Warning: reading the article out loud to one’s spouse may result in disruption of reading due to uncontrollable laughter on the part of the reader.

Weingarten submitted a short story to the software, including such gems as:

The two lovers writhed as one, entwined and moist, like a spool of twine that had been dropped in the toilet.

The software gave the story a positive evaluation.

Maybe WriterHouse should consider a lucrative consulting contract with this software company…