I was watching an episode of Gilmore Girls a couple weeks ago. They talk really, really fast on that show. Anyway, and Paris and Rory had a conversation something like this:
Paris: Are you getting all the stuff done on your list before graduation? Have you registered for the GRE and sent your application for law school and did you submit your poem to the Iowa Review’s poetry contest?
Rory: I don’t want to go to law school, and I don’t like to write poetry, get off my back.
Paris: Please, it’s just a poem. It’ll take TWENTY minutes. Just whip something out and get it done.
First of all, screw you, you... you... imaginary TV land character. Second of all, poor readers for poetry contests have to sift out about 3,000 poems written in twenty minutes by people like this. I'm not whining about how hard it is--lots of things worth doing are hard--I'm whining about people who blow off something I value that is misunderstood. In real life, not just TV land.
Any writer who can write something in twenty minutes good enough to win a respectable contest is a freak of nature. A freak of nature I envy, but still—writing isn’t finger painting, friends.
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2 comments:
Amen, alleluia, and praise the Iowa review. Thank you for this post. I feel vindicated, even though I don't write poetry.
Memoir doesn't go fast either.
Just to clarify: the point is that you CAN write a poem in 20 minutes but it's going to suck on monkey scrotum. Is that correct?
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