"Holly Lisle - Mugging The Muse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

happier, I'm more productive. And I keep hoping that the next time my noisy mind
tries to get me to skip my morning silence, I'll remember that. Perhaps what it really
takes is getting smarter. Maybe the silence will eventually even give me that.




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 MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 24




Experts, Professionals, and College
Do I have to have a college education to make it as a writer?тАЭ тАЬI haven't finished high
school. Can I still write?тАЭ тАЬI've always wanted to be a writer, and I've done a lot of
writing, but I couldn't afford to go to college when I was younger . . .тАЭ
This question arrives in my e-mail box about once a week, worded in any of a dozen
different ways. Some of the questioners tiptoe around it, embarrassed to ask, pretty
sure they know what the answer is going to be, but hoping that it won't. Sometimes I
can feel the frustration and the pain, the barriers erected by poverty or lack of a
diploma or lack of time. Some of the questioners are as young as thirteen, some have
been as old a sixty.

All of them are pretty sure that formal education is the road to writing; that a degree
will confer legitimacy to their words and their lives; that if they could just get more
schooling, publishers' doors would open.
They've been brainwashed by experts, by a system designed to create people who fit
neatly into categories like 'accountant' and 'nurse' and 'manager'. They've been trained
to believe that the best education is an education that comes from sitting passively in
a desk in an overcrowded room, being talked at by an expert.
Obviously, experts have gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure they (and
perhaps you) believed this. They've tried to get employers to make grades the basis
for hiring тАУ a move many employers have so far been bright enough to refuse. They
have managed to close many fields to anyone who hasn't sat in the box like a good
little drone for sixteen years or more. You now have to have a degree to be an
architect, a doctor, a teacher, or an engineer. Experts are trying to make sure you have
to have a degree to become an RN. They'd also prefer that you had to have a degree
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 MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 25

in order to be a social worker, respiratory therapist, an interior decorator . . . and
sooner or later, when they make degrees mandatory to those fields, I imagine they'll
get to work on truckers and plumbers and bakers and hairdressers. College-educated
experts are trying to close every field, because college education is big, pricey
business, and the more people that have to go through it, the more money the experts
make.
And if you think I'm full of shit here, and that people really do need college
educations before going out and doing great things, consider this тАУ the gothic
cathedrals, the pyramids, and the Roman roads and aqueducts were designed and built