writer voice

There are a lot of things in the memoir I’m working on that just don’t fit. It’s a pretty tight focus on my first romantic relationship and how that led me to living with a cult that thought we were being followed and watched by enemies at all times.

So I’m leaving out a lot of my other college experiences, even if they’re relatively interesting.

One thing that’s not making the cut is my spring break writers’ workshop with Orson Scott Card — one of my first semi-professional writing experiences.

That guy hated me.

Or at least he hated my writing.

As a genre writer (and a bigot), he told me that my voice was irrelevant because I was a nobody, so witty and voice-forward writing was never going to get me anywhere. He dismissed my stories that had the entire group laughing aloud with a big old shrug. He said, in a comment that has aged poorly, “if Woody Allen wrote this in the New Yorker, it’d be great, but you’re not Woody Allen. Who cares about Jeffrey?”

It took about a decade to get over that.

And now it’s been over two decades, and I’m finally back to writing as much as I did in college and as much as I always thought I would.

What a jackass.

Back to work.