A friend asked if there was any benefit to taking writing classes in college. I thought I might as well post my disorganized thoughts here as well as in the comments to the entry. What do the rest of you think?

In my experience, classes fall on a long spectrum between the pointless (or worse than pointless) and the revelatory. The absolute best classes will give you guidance not really on how to write, but how to analyze the parts of your own writing; they'll give you tools instead of rules. (Passive voice, for example? Is an excellent tool for when you *want* to pull the actor out of the action, which can be used to very haunting effect. To continue the tool analogy, you can say that a kitchen knife is better than a scalpel, but that only applies when you're trying to cut food. If you're removing a tumour, go for the scalpel every time. A tool's usefulness can only be measured against its desired effect.) They'll teach you to look not at what you're doing so much as how what you're doing affects the story you're writing.

Another thing a writing class – well, a workshop class – will give you is the chance to see how your writing affects people who aren't you, and to get feedback on what people think worked and what didn't. Feedback and the chance to engage in a dialogue are wonderful things, and also hugely useful, if the people involved take time and care in discussing it and if they're somewhere around your target audience. (In my weekly crit group, we had someone who comes from a literary background critiquing an urban-fantastical story, and some of the advice she gave was perfect for a literary story but potentially damaging for a speculative fiction story. It was apparently common-sense things like "You need to explain that this is a fantastical world right off the bat," which – no, because a reader of speculative fiction is going to assume that it is. It'd be like explaining that the main characters were people instead of bricks.)

The most important thing, in my opinion, a class or workshop can do for you is to give you a community you can later draw on. My writing group now evolved from a class I took here at university. I'm in a lot of contact with my Clarion West class, who provide not only help with stories, still, but also advice on a lot of the rest of my life (like where good job markets lie and how to construct my CV.)

The thing is, all of these can be found outside of a class. You can develop those analytical skills on your own, you can find or form your own community, especially online where the cost of gathering is basically null. Classes offer it all in one convenient location and give you a structure to make things not fall apart, but they're not 100% necessary, especially as so much depends on the teachers and the classmates. I would not be where I am now without attending Clarion West, because it was a focused and intense workshop with 6 instructors and 18 students, each of which brought their own perspectives, theories, and toolsets to be picked through. But I've had workshops where the only really valuable thing I got was the encouragement (in fact, the requirement) to write.

There's this truism which says a story is finished when the thought of revising it one more time makes you cry.

I'm about at that stage with Jessamine, which is on its fifth draft and was my Clarion West application story, but since I last looked at it, I know I've improved as a writer and my CW instructors did have a few things to say about it which could nudge me in the right direction toward revising again. So now I have to decide: is it finished, or not?

Questions, questions. I may just try to finish Year of the Rabbit and possibly rename that, and come back to Jessamine when I've developed a taste for wine.

It seems that this month is my oyster! I've just accepted an invitation to the Clarion West Writers Workshop, so six weeks of my summer are going to be spent learning craft from some truly amazing writers.

I seem to have not one but three novellas in the works, and at some point in the near future rachel_swirsky, ann_leckie, radiationdream and Mysterious Possible Others will be having a Novel Race to work out some of our problem children. (Well, I'll be working out a problem child. I probably shouldn't speak for others.)

I have one new piece of fiction up and out the door to markets: My Father's Heroes, a much softer (though in some ways harder) piece of specfic than I've written in some time. It's always fun to play in various subgenres, though I'm feeling a distinct hankering to get back to hard SF.