I met with the TA of my Research Methods class to discuss my literature review today, meaning all the background research I had summarized and included in the massive essay we've been tasked to write this semester. She explained that she was having a hard time understanding what I was doing with my hypothetical research project, and recommended that I set up another appointment to meet with both her and my teacher together.
When I first started working on this essay, it was supposed to be about aggression and commitment levels among teen couples. That didn't work out the way I planned, so I scrapped the research articles I had and chose ten new ones related to flirtation and attractiveness, and started my essay over. Now it looks like I'll be choosing ten new articles and writing about asexuality as a sexual orientation instead. I can do that. Wasn't my original plan, but I can do that.
Every day in fiction writing, we workshop two stories. Everyone in class downloads and reads the stories beforehand and leaves commentary on the Word document via the Track Changes option. We submit one copy online for our teacher, and print out a hardcopy for the writer. One of the pieces we workshopped today was about a food fight that takes place in a cramped box kitchen between a husband coming home from work and a woman who loves to cook and who pulls out random ingredients when she does so (which turned out to be a very clever and important detail later, because it provides plenty of ammunition for the impending food fight). Inevitably, an argument between her and her husband turns to throwing food, and at the end of the piece, you find out it's their anniversary.
There were some lines in this piece that I really liked. The woman checks her make-up in the toaster and is happy that the heat from the oven didn't melt it off. Towards the end of the story, her make-up starts to run due to wet food on her face. When I was doing my Track Changes, I made a comment that said, "No! How dare you? She was so proud her make-up hadn't melted!"
Our fiction writing teacher always tries to be super politically correct. Case in point: Today she called out one girl who said that she liked the way the argument had broken out because she thought "That was a very girl thing to do, that the wife didn't ask him verbally to throw the old and nearly-empty container of cream out of the fridge, but she kept waiting hoping he would, because it's his cream". In the story, the argument about the expired cream in the fridge quickly became a two-way argument about all the many ridiculous habits the other partner has. My favorite part was that the wife always refused to turn off the lights when she was alone in the house, because she was afraid the place was haunted. This understandably annoyed her husband just like him leaving the cream in the fridge annoyed her. It gave her a flaw, and made the fight not a one-sided attack on her husband.
Anyway, our teacher gave us a spiel about how we can't describe behaviors as "male" and "female" when we critique. Okay, sure. We're a class entirely of girls without a single boy around and we are honestly expressing individual opinions and interpretations about what we just read, trying to act like a group of average readers who picked the piece up, but sure. My teacher followed this by explaining how the woman refusing to turn off the lights was "a stereotype" and that the entire fight was, again a stereotype. The writer isn't allowed to talk during critique time, so she just say there, visibly uncomfortable, as our teacher went off about things like this, and about how the image of a breadwinning husband and homemaking wife in the kitchen doesn't appeal to modern readers, and we shouldn't write such stereotypical things.
Finally, my teacher said that one problem with this piece is that at the end, when it's revealed it's the couple's anniversary, the closure comes from them laughing together on the floor and sharing a kiss. She said that them being happy could be offensive to poor people due to the amount of food that is now ruined, and suggested that the writer especially redo the ending to include a sense of waste and loss. After all, some readers might not be able to afford very much food. Probably because they're spending the money they do have to buy luxury items like short story collections.
I don't disagree about including a sense of waste in the rewrite. Bittersweet endings are my favorite, and it does seem like the woman who cooked so much food for so much of the day might be disappointed about it being inedible now. But I felt a bit offended on behalf of the writer. Our teacher was straight-up targeting her for writing about a food fight- and taking time away for the rest of us to offer comments, might I add. Each writer only has 25 minutes to be workshopped. Not to mention, everyone needs to make a comment in order to earn their individual credit during the workshop. We receive a 0 if we don't.
The way I see it, the writer just wanted to write about a food fight. By definition, food fights result in waste. I understand that people from certain backgrounds may read the same piece of writing differently than another person. Some of us happened to be readers who saw the woman's reluctance to throw out her husband's nearly-empty container of cream as a feminine behavior, but it's "wrong" to say that. Well, maybe some people grew up with the background that that's a feminine behavior, just like some people may have grown up with a poorer background that makes them sad to see all that wasted food.
My teacher straight-up said that you should write to please your audience. Um. Okay. But consider: You can't please everyone. Yes, when you publish, you have to keep your audience in mind, but you should still be writing for yourself and enjoying what you do. For the record, the couple in the piece were living in an apartment rather than some fancy house. They weren't exactly poor, but they weren't on top of the world either.
And yes, there were a lot of gender stereotypes in the story. The wife was cooking at home while the husband was at work. Very stereotypical. But keep in mind that the wife was described as loving to cook, and it was also their anniversary. Doesn't it make sense that she would go all out for this one special day? Maybe she even has a job and used one of her vacation days to stay at home for this. Who knows. Isn't it stereotypical to just assume she didn't have a job just because she wasn't seen working one during the eight pages of this story that had nothing to do with her job?
Anyway. That was fiction writing class. After that, I went to Institute, then came home and cleaned the fridge and other areas of room. I sent this picture of my fridge to Mom:
Most of my food right now doesn't need to be refrigerated. It's weird to live alone sometimes. I don't have anyone to start a food fight with.
When I first started working on this essay, it was supposed to be about aggression and commitment levels among teen couples. That didn't work out the way I planned, so I scrapped the research articles I had and chose ten new ones related to flirtation and attractiveness, and started my essay over. Now it looks like I'll be choosing ten new articles and writing about asexuality as a sexual orientation instead. I can do that. Wasn't my original plan, but I can do that.
Every day in fiction writing, we workshop two stories. Everyone in class downloads and reads the stories beforehand and leaves commentary on the Word document via the Track Changes option. We submit one copy online for our teacher, and print out a hardcopy for the writer. One of the pieces we workshopped today was about a food fight that takes place in a cramped box kitchen between a husband coming home from work and a woman who loves to cook and who pulls out random ingredients when she does so (which turned out to be a very clever and important detail later, because it provides plenty of ammunition for the impending food fight). Inevitably, an argument between her and her husband turns to throwing food, and at the end of the piece, you find out it's their anniversary.
There were some lines in this piece that I really liked. The woman checks her make-up in the toaster and is happy that the heat from the oven didn't melt it off. Towards the end of the story, her make-up starts to run due to wet food on her face. When I was doing my Track Changes, I made a comment that said, "No! How dare you? She was so proud her make-up hadn't melted!"
Our fiction writing teacher always tries to be super politically correct. Case in point: Today she called out one girl who said that she liked the way the argument had broken out because she thought "That was a very girl thing to do, that the wife didn't ask him verbally to throw the old and nearly-empty container of cream out of the fridge, but she kept waiting hoping he would, because it's his cream". In the story, the argument about the expired cream in the fridge quickly became a two-way argument about all the many ridiculous habits the other partner has. My favorite part was that the wife always refused to turn off the lights when she was alone in the house, because she was afraid the place was haunted. This understandably annoyed her husband just like him leaving the cream in the fridge annoyed her. It gave her a flaw, and made the fight not a one-sided attack on her husband.
Anyway, our teacher gave us a spiel about how we can't describe behaviors as "male" and "female" when we critique. Okay, sure. We're a class entirely of girls without a single boy around and we are honestly expressing individual opinions and interpretations about what we just read, trying to act like a group of average readers who picked the piece up, but sure. My teacher followed this by explaining how the woman refusing to turn off the lights was "a stereotype" and that the entire fight was, again a stereotype. The writer isn't allowed to talk during critique time, so she just say there, visibly uncomfortable, as our teacher went off about things like this, and about how the image of a breadwinning husband and homemaking wife in the kitchen doesn't appeal to modern readers, and we shouldn't write such stereotypical things.
Finally, my teacher said that one problem with this piece is that at the end, when it's revealed it's the couple's anniversary, the closure comes from them laughing together on the floor and sharing a kiss. She said that them being happy could be offensive to poor people due to the amount of food that is now ruined, and suggested that the writer especially redo the ending to include a sense of waste and loss. After all, some readers might not be able to afford very much food. Probably because they're spending the money they do have to buy luxury items like short story collections.
I don't disagree about including a sense of waste in the rewrite. Bittersweet endings are my favorite, and it does seem like the woman who cooked so much food for so much of the day might be disappointed about it being inedible now. But I felt a bit offended on behalf of the writer. Our teacher was straight-up targeting her for writing about a food fight- and taking time away for the rest of us to offer comments, might I add. Each writer only has 25 minutes to be workshopped. Not to mention, everyone needs to make a comment in order to earn their individual credit during the workshop. We receive a 0 if we don't.
The way I see it, the writer just wanted to write about a food fight. By definition, food fights result in waste. I understand that people from certain backgrounds may read the same piece of writing differently than another person. Some of us happened to be readers who saw the woman's reluctance to throw out her husband's nearly-empty container of cream as a feminine behavior, but it's "wrong" to say that. Well, maybe some people grew up with the background that that's a feminine behavior, just like some people may have grown up with a poorer background that makes them sad to see all that wasted food.
My teacher straight-up said that you should write to please your audience. Um. Okay. But consider: You can't please everyone. Yes, when you publish, you have to keep your audience in mind, but you should still be writing for yourself and enjoying what you do. For the record, the couple in the piece were living in an apartment rather than some fancy house. They weren't exactly poor, but they weren't on top of the world either.
And yes, there were a lot of gender stereotypes in the story. The wife was cooking at home while the husband was at work. Very stereotypical. But keep in mind that the wife was described as loving to cook, and it was also their anniversary. Doesn't it make sense that she would go all out for this one special day? Maybe she even has a job and used one of her vacation days to stay at home for this. Who knows. Isn't it stereotypical to just assume she didn't have a job just because she wasn't seen working one during the eight pages of this story that had nothing to do with her job?
Anyway. That was fiction writing class. After that, I went to Institute, then came home and cleaned the fridge and other areas of room. I sent this picture of my fridge to Mom:
Most of my food right now doesn't need to be refrigerated. It's weird to live alone sometimes. I don't have anyone to start a food fight with.
