Fruit Trees

So, as discussed in my last blog post, I saw some fruit trees in Rome. More specifically, as I was wandering through the forum I noticed not only what looked like an orchard, but also a few random lemon trees scattered around the place.

And at that point I realized that the world of my novel was completely lacking in fruit trees. Maybe it's because I grew up in Colorado, where we don't have many fruit trees, but I never really noticed that in warmer climes they have 'em scattered around all over place, or gave any thought to the idea that different regions specialize in producing different kinds of fruits (vegetables too, I suppose).

It then occurred to me that these are the kinds of things that Creative Writing degree programs are woefully lacking in teaching you to notice. Creative Writing with a capital CW, i.e. what they teach in high school and college (college moreso than high school), is meant in most cases to prepare you to write literary fiction--as I've been told a decision that resulted from the fight to get universities to offer degrees in the subject at all. That's all well and good, but writers of literary fiction don't often need to worry about whether the world they're creating has fruit trees. This means two things: that fruit trees are mostly irrelevant to the curriculum, and that most of the teachers of said curriculum have never had to worry about fruit trees anyway, and might not even know about their merits.

I say these things a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I think there's some truth to them. I think the most valuable part of my Creative Writing degree track has been to teach me that I shouldn't have bothered with it in the first place---most of what I learned in my Creative Writing classes isn't applicable to what I write, and most what I've learned in college that is I learned from other classes, or from bending the curriculum by sheer force towards projects that I knew would benefit me.

Just a bit of advice for those thinking about studying Creative Writing, as opposed plain old, lowercase 'w', writing.