The creative writing angle. After learning about the shooting at Virginia Tech, I was feeling fairly pessimistic about the human race. Shocked? I suppose, to some degree, but earlier in the month there was a shooting death of one of the undergraduates at my school, too. That was fairly shocking because this town is considered pretty safe. Some people even leave their doors unlocked and don't get things broken into.
As for the CBSnews article that Eden mentioned in the link above--my first reaction was a sort of "I can't believe they're using that as a reason why the shooting happened." If a creative writing teacher can't tell between fact and fiction--well, never mind. Many creative writing classes I have taken were a bunch of bunk. And it should be obvious that English professors are not psychology experts.
Anyways, as a student who moonlights writing weird fiction, I resent the fact that someone is trying to pigeon-hole all writers of disturbing fiction as gun-toting depressive maniacs. It's an implication that the only acceptable writing is "happy" writing. Pfft. You might as well dose the entire populace let alone the literary critics with soma.
I'm not a big fan of weird fiction, but my guess is that creative writing faculty see a wide variety of genres and don't automatically believe that violence in stories means the writer is dangerous. I didn't take away from the professor's remarks that the gunman's fiction was the sole reason he was considered strange, but one piece among many odd behaviors that included photographing other students with his cell phone, not participating in the first day go-around, and signing the attendance sheet with a question mark. Not that any of those things necessarily adds up to being a sociopath, but it is natural to look back and try to make sense of it. A student who was in one of my classes two years ago committed suicide. Hindsight is 20/20, and I certainly don't blame myself for not intervening or think it is likely I could have done anything, but when someone asks me if I noticed any warning flags, I have to admit that a presentation he gave in class two weeks before was outside the norm.
hi. been a long time. i've been pondering this, too, and i think that maybe there is something to the mass-media's take. yeah, on the one hand, i think a person should be able to write really dark stuff w/o it suggesting bad character. but it's interesting to consider writing as a fraction of a person's total communications. for most of us, the dark stuff is a small share -- an outlet for things we don't express normally. from what i read, for cho, there was no counterbalance. most of what he expressed -- in writing or any other form -- seemed to be pretty disturbed. i think it would probably be naive not to consider that a bit of a bad sign.
