Senior Project is slowly killing me :(

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so i just made it through my mid-process critique in my senior project class. for those of you who don't know what that is, it's a critique during midterms where the professor and the class check up on your progress so far in your story. usually of course, i dread critiques. for me at least they feel like five hour discussions of everything you did wrong (or rather everything people had WISHED you'd done, which is even worse).

despite my anxiety i made it through okay. they said a lot of positive things and criticized stuff i either was going to correct anyway or had put in TO be criticized (the characters in my story are morally ambiguous, and whomever side you take is your choice. that's what i like about it). but rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment, i don't feel anything. i just feel tired.

i'm not gonna lie, i've really started to grow to resent my classmates. i've kind of been an outsider ever since i came to this school and i've accepted that, but now it's become just unbearable. there's this one kid who i think is obnoxious but everybody else loves him. he seriously said that anybody who puts him in their story he'll give ten bucks. three people have actually taken this smug son of a b***h up on it! they also put little cameos from other people in the class in there too. it's stupid but...i feel left out.

also a big point of the class is to "listen" to their ideas during critique. i just frankly don't want to because their ideas are terrible, i know how arrogant that sounds but it's the truth. this one kid's story is downright racist (think West Side Story but worse) and another's is a blatant rip-off of Star Wars. and i'm supposed to listen to these pricks? i feel like everyone in the class is listening to Bach and while all i hear is a 3 year old screaming.

they also tell you soul crushing stuff like "you can't really write women" or "i'm glad you're not doing that cause it drives me and everyone nuts". i know artists are supposed to have thick skin, but still, i hear that and it feels like somebody crushed my soul with a big fat boot.

i have 6 more weeks to do this amid a full class load (i really got the short end of the scheduling s**t stick this semester). with this and a bunch of other stuff i just feel like everything and everyone's against me and i can't win no matter what i do...i'm not sure i can make it.

Last edited by jamesohgoodie on 10 Mar 2008, 3:42 am, edited 2 times in total.

I know EXACTLY how you feel. I'm going through the same thing right now, and I too wish it would just hurry up and be done! I don't really have any suggestions for you, as I haven't been able to figure that out myself.

"they also tell you soul crushing stuff like "you can't really write women" or "i'm glad you're not doing that cause it drives me and everyone nuts".

^Is this your instructor[s] saying that?! If so, you should complain about it, because that doesn't really sound very appropriate. If it's the students, I can totally say I'm having the same problem, but basically what I'm doing is making sure that I have NO contact if possible with any of these people. I don't spend any more time in the physical classroom than is absolutely necessary for me to do.

"there's this one kid who i think is obnoxious but everybody else loves him. he seriously said that anybody who puts him in their story he'll give ten bucks. three people have actually taken this smug son of a b***h up on it! "

We've been having the exact same thing happen, with these two guys though. If I was a bit bigger I'm sure I would have done something really bad to both of them....

"i feel like everyone in the class is listening to Bach and while all i hear is a 3 year old screaming. " They like to think they're hearing Bach, but they're actually not! You're hearing the real 'music' so to speak.

the "women" thing was half the instructor half the class. the instructor elaborated and said that my male characters were more lively while my female characters felt more flat. my original story had two women as the leads and she didn't think this played to my strengths as a writer. still, it's very very weird to be told you can't write for essentially 50% of humanity. and here i thought i'd been writing women just fine for years. y'know i've met a few women in my lifetime. is it that hard?

the second was something a classmate told me when i was thinking of doing an improved version of one of my longtime projects. thing is she i know she thought she was being helpful but she totally wasn't. what makes it worse is she's one of the people everyone tells me i should listen to, but of course i'm not at this point.

the other person everyone thinks i should listen to is the T.A. who's a former classmate of mine and is a rather smug sonuvabitch himself. he's actually suggested going to stripclubs to learn how to draw the female figure better.

sheesh, and they say i have trouble with women in my work...