This week is the last week of classes.  Huzzah.  In preparation to say goodbye to my students, me and fellow Barker, Monsieur Fuller, have been running a writing workshop to help students talk out their thesis ideas and to explain to them one more time that I am sure a question mark cannot go in the middle of a sentence.  Overall, though, I must say I am pretty impressed with what I have seen so far.  I know I’ve complained about this class before on here but they are really stepping it up a notch.

On that note I had one young lady come in to a session really frustrated.   Then again she was also writing her paper on her IPod.  Anyways I asked her why she was so frustrated and she that she was a really good writer but she wrote fiction and writing academically was tough for her and she couldn’t understand why.  She also said she was “complete pathos with her writing.”

I had never heard a writer talk about their own work like that or even use that word in that way so I went and looked it up.  Dictionary.com says that pathos is the feeling of pity or suffering one gets when exposed to a work of art or an experience.  I guess I don’t really know what this girl meant when she said that her work was pathos but I think she was speaking to the goal of her fiction, to elicit a feeling of sympathy and caring for her characters.  I can buy that completely that is a goal of fiction.  What I have had a hard time with lately is how to do that without making the reader feel sad or pity for a character.   It’s true the best stories seem to depend on the reader having that yucky pity feeling but in a lot of ways that seems like a false way to represent the human experience, which I kind of think is the main goal of writing, art,  everything.  But then art that works to bring out happiness, excitement, humor, or anything else seem to either fall under some sort of genre fiction or it relies on a gimmick to be successful as opposed to working despite it.  I don’t have a good answer on this but, maybe, it’s a good thing to think about this week.  Do we go to those standard pity/sorrow emotions because it’s the only way to represent our characters or because it’s easy?