Hearing this makes me so sad, and so thankful I had a kickass creative writing professor and mentor who didn’t give a shit what you wrote so long as you gave it your heart and soul. He was one of the few professors on my campus who didn’t bat an eye at genre work.
He believed in writing. He believed in putting all of yourself into the thing you cared enough to write down, because there was no reason for anyone to read it. Write it anyway. You are the one who makes it matter.
And we, his students, did. We wrote sci fi. We wrote fantasy. We wrote about lesbians in love, we wrote about killer chickens and karaoke queens. And you know what? The quality of writing in that class was off the fucking charts.
My senior thesis and my masters thesis were both soft sci-fi/fantasy epics (that started as AU fanfics) that in retrospect were terrible, but he encouraged me, mentored me, and helped me take them as far as I wanted to go because he recognized how passionate I was about those stories and those characters. Something he told me that I will never forget, was how writers should really believe in the things they write. To the outside world it’s fiction, but to you, the writer, it’s real. It has to be.
“If I asked you whether you believed Skratt Tenvito [one of my characters] was real, you’d probably tell me no. But Swaps, is he real? Deep down, the answer better be yes.”
At the time I was a writer with potential who was finding her way. Without his guidance and encouragement I never would have found my voice and my confidence.
