Unfiltered Story #32740

(I’ve been writing stories since I was ten-years-old. It’s a great passion of mine. I’m a stickler for punctuation, grammar, spelling, and also plot twists, character developments, and so on. Naturally, I take all the writing courses I can find when I get into college, in particular fiction writing. I sign up for the intermediate class, because the advanced fiction writing is restrictive and you can only get in by invitation of the professor. I end up running into a friend I have known since we were about twelve and graduated high school with. For the sake of this story, let’s call him Piers. In the class, much of our work is peer editing. Each week, two students will submit their stories and the rest of us are supposed to write two page reviews that are double spaced. Eventually, it’s my turn to submit my story.)

Piers: *outside of class* Your writing is too confusing.

Me: What do you mean?

Piers: It’s too confusing. Most people won’t get it.

Me: How so? What’s confusing about it?

Piers: You need to condense stuff, ya know? You spend too much time making it difficult for us to guess what’s going on. No one’s going to figure it out.

Me: …so, I need to dumb it down for the masses?

Piers: Yes! No one’s going to like your writing if they’re confused all the time. It’s frustrating.

Me: Well, I don’t write for the masses. I write for me. And if certain people can’t understand it, then they’re not the right readers for my work. Besides, I’d rather have a cult following than be a world renowned author.

Piers: *waves me off* People aren’t going to like what they don’t understand.

(When I received his review in class, it was literally four sentences! Overall, it summed up what he had told me after class and also added that I used TOO MUCH punctuation, which led to even more confusion. When it was his turn to submit his work, after much bragging on his part about how even a Hollywood movie company had purchased it from him-no, I am not joking, he actually told me that-the story was absolutely painful to read. It was filled with fragments and run-ons, spelling errors, poor ideas, insipid characters, etc. I was happy to tear the story to shreds with a red pen and write a “school appropriate” review. As for the review he gave me, I used it to kill a spider in my room. At the end of the semester, guess who was invited by the professor to join the advanced class and who was not? And now, anytime I have a character who is an insecure, little jerk, I name him Piers, as that is an abbreviated sound of my former friend’s last name.)