What started on digital paper as a single post about my journey through writing programs morphed into a trilogy. In Writer’s Craft Wissenschaft - Part 1, I introduced the world and set the scenario. Writer’s Craft Wissenschaft - Part 2 was the dark chapter; the stakes were raised, and the readers were left wondering how the protagonist would get out by the end. And now we have reached the third entry. The epic conclusion. Sometimes, these are the hardest to pull off. There’s a delicate dance of wrapping up the story, putting a bow on the themes, and giving the audience a satisfying/well-earned ending. Will I achieve it, or will [Lockjaw Fletcher], thought to be long gone, appear in a dark catacomb to tell me he’s my grandfather and title the post, ‘Doesn’t work.’

The Lesson

To honour [Lockjaw Fletcher], I’ll spend the rest of this post speaking to you in second-person, the “right” way. Reader, you may ask, “Should I do a post-secondary program in creative writing?”

The answer is yes and no. It comes down to figuring out what you’re trying to learn, what you want to accomplish. Write short stories, poems, or scripts and figure out what you like. Ask yourself what you’re trying to do. If you try your hardest, and you come up with nothing but a blank page, or if you rack your brain so hard you come up with your fingertips coated in bloody pink chunks, but no answers, then I’d say going straight into a course or a program right away. Everyone works differently, and some people need more guidance than others.

Otherwise, take the time to discover yourself. Just write from the gut, not preoccupied by rules. Be sloppy, take risks, throw whatever comes to mind at your work, and when the dust settles, look at the mess you’ve created. Once you’ve gotten that out of your system, the real work begins.

This is where you can start seeing what’s out there. Complete an independent wissenschaft. There are tons of books and free resources to teach you about the essentials of writing: voice, structure, character, pacing, clarity, and the art of revision. Even more important: read and consume other author’s work. Read who you want to be like, read who you don’t want to be like. Read fiction, and read lots of non-fiction. Try different types of books.

Every genre, even those you think you’ll never touch, has something to teach. Horror shows you how to build tension and atmosphere. Romance teaches emotional timing and how to create chemistry between characters. Mystery helps you understand the release of information and how to hold attention. Science fiction is invaluable for learning how to build convincing worlds and maintain internal logic. Comedy, though often overlooked, teaches rhythm, contrast, and the importance of surprise.

The Wasp Factory, for example, is not sci-fi, yet the world feels as carefully constructed as one. The protagonist’s isolated internal logic and detailed rituals have the same immersive quality found in speculative fiction. It is no accident that Iain Banks (as Iain M. Banks) also wrote science fiction. What he learned in one genre deepened his work in another.

At the end of the day, every creative piece of writing you produce is a learning experience; you are learning how to write that novel, that poem, that screenplay. Every story demands something different from you, and what worked last time will rarely work again.

From that point, if you still need one, a writing program can be beneficial. Their greatest perks are having accountability and beta testing your ideas. While no one should ever tell you there’s a concrete way to do things right, getting feedback will help you know how things come across. Even if someone clearly isn’t your audience, it helps you to perhaps see a way to seek clarity for someone who’s not in on it with you. If you do decide to pursue it, look into how they’re conducted.

Whether it’s undergrad, a Master’s program, or a seminar in your neighbour’s garage, the value comes down to the style and structure of the program and the instructors involved. Some offer workshops where you sit with other students and critique each other’s work. While some offer one-on-ones with advisors. Figure out what you like. In university, I did a creative writing course where a circle of peers gave each other input. The benefit of that is the diversity of opinion and work you’re exposed to. The downside is the lack of experience reflected in their feedback and in their writing. But overall, the sense of community, even to a lonewolf like myself, is something to appreciate.

In the end, progress in writing is not about mastery. It is about curiosity. Every book, every failure, every small success teaches you something new about your own mind.

Hopefully, this has all been helpful. Moving forward, I’ll talk more about writing and topics around it. But I also want to make topical posts from time to time that may tangentially be related. I’ll be trying that with the next one.

Since the last post, Writer’s Craft Wissenschaft: Part 1, I gave my Humber College writing mentor a heads-up about his alias, Dr. Goodall. He mulled it over and came back with a suggestion: stick to the truth of my experiences and avoid generalizing when I can. Using his real name, he said, was something he preferred in the interest of showcasing truth and authenticity. As he put it:

“[A]utobiographical writing can be a way of
letting the subjective speak for the general… The more particular
you get, the more general the resonance. It’s a paradox, but the more
you speak of your subjective experience, and the more honestly and
energetically you do that, the more people will identify with it.”

~ Colin McAdam

A known truth, but an effective reminder.

When it comes to using real names, something else that I’ve come to know about my approach to writing is that I like to pepper in specs of hyperbole and veer away from mundanity and weave in a little surrealism. Part of that is why I enjoy pseudonyms for people and places in my life. So in general, you will find that I’ll continue to mask names and places. Though true to [Dr. Goodall]… I mean… Colin McAdam’s words, I’ll give my honest perspective on everything. Something I will face head-on in this post as I can’t speak of my experience with his successor, my MA dissertation advisor, in a positive light.

In this era where venomous vituperation oozes through the veins of a hemorrhaging civilization, I try my best to project at minimum, an even tone, and at best, a ray of positivity. An antidote to the venom. Despite my interest in writing about the darker matters of life. I drizzle Buckley’s over the cheesecake.

Thus, it brings me no pleasure to recount my experience in the MA program. But if sifting through bullshit yields a few gems, perhaps it’s worth the mess.

Tale 2: A War of Words

So I decided to pursue a Master’s degree. In theory, it was a chance to sharpen the academic lens and add a few letters to my name. In practice, it was like playing a “Souls” game; every move made with consternation, never knowing what could result in punishment. Time was spent parrying endless attacks and feeling as if a significant amount of progress and experience were wiped away at the end of a gruelling session.

Unlike Humber’s program, once I was accepted into this one at the University, I didn’t get to choose who I was working with. I was asked to fill out a little questionnaire about what my project was about, my timezone (the school is in the UK) and a few other questions. When the time came, they let me know I was set up with [Lockjaw Fletcher]. A quick internet search left me baffled, wondering how that guy, an army vet who writes hard-nosed military/political thrillers that have garnered a niche following, would be a good fit for my style. Most of what he edits as a developmental editor and writing coach is for other vets covering similar subject matter. Where I’m writing a surreal, experimental, darkly humourous novel set in a fractured reality. The only thing I could see was that he also lives in Canada, with just a one-hour difference in time-zone. If I had to guess, that was the deciding factor.

We eventually had a meet and greet over Zoom, and I can say that he’s a nice enough person whose skills I overall don’t doubt as a writer, academic, or editor. But when it comes to my novel, it was abundantly clear that [Lockjaw Fletcher] was a horrible match. Everyone has their limitations. In the Humber program, someone was writing “Sapphic Romance”. I had to look up what it was, and let’s just say, I’d be out of my wheelhouse trying to advise someone on that. Though I admit… Maybe fun to read.

When it came to [Lockjaw Fletcher]’s edits. The experience often felt like watching someone going up against a fetus with a C7A2 automatic rifle. The openers were friendly enough, each beginning with empty pleasantries along the lines of: “Thank you for allowing me to read this.” Then followed them up with paragraphs dumping copious amounts of feces on my entries as if he were an AI rendition of a US President in a fighter jet.

He didn’t agree with a single decision I made. Much of it had to do with the narration. My novel uses second-person narration, addressed to a specific protagonist with a name, their own life, physical description, backstory and personality. He rejected that outright. “It doesn’t work” was a favourite phrase. It was also all I needed to know about his outlook on the craft.

He was under the impression that second-person narration could only ever be a placeholder for “you, the reader” and not a particular character in the novel. Not being done before, or often, in my eyes, doesn’t equate to something being a literary crime. And honestly, it had been done. I found and read a handful of books with relative success, such as Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins, and the murder sections of Iain Banks’ Complicity are in the second-person, which proved otherwise.

My novel also delves heavily into metafiction. The protagonist is reading a book within the book. Those sections use third-person narration to describe the events of the other characters in focus. He said I couldn’t do that either. His reaction was as if I wanted to write the entire book switching between Latin and Esperanto any time I sneezed, while flipping every fifth word upside down, and turning every fourteenth word backward. He couldn’t get his head around it.

It’s set in an alternate timeline. The world is anachronistic. Technology progressed differently, so devices have different names, like what you’d find in, say, a Phillip K. Dick novel. Locations are similar to ones in our world (but different enough), such as having Gotham City instead of New York. To him, the concept came across as “arbitrary”. It was off-putting right from that first experience. I lost any confidence in what he could offer, and still had over half a year to go.

Criticism isn’t something I’m averse to, and with the work being in an early draft form, I know nothing will resemble the final product. I’m my toughest critic, and a part of me dies of embarrassment any time I read anything I’ve written more than 5 minutes earlier. But at the end of the day, I know what I’m going for, and to tell me to jettison ideas central to the project because they didn’t conform to his viewpoint on what “works” didn’t make sense to me. There was no middle ground. No curiosity. No inquiry into what my intentions were. It’s the difference between getting a compass and marking your path versus getting told to chop your legs off, use them to lure over a bear, and hop up on its back.

I mixed up those metaphors, since frankly, he probably was trying to give the “common sense” rules, where I’m taking a more avant-garde approach.

To him, there was a singular “right way” to write a novel, and I needed to get on board. Maybe he thought we were Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons in Whiplash, and what I had wasn’t his tempo. But that with enough blood, sweat, and typewriters thrown at my face, I’d be whipped into a perfect tradesman in a way only he understood.

I was going to conclude this with my overall takeaways on the combined experience, and answer the question: Is getting an MA or any form of Creative Writing education worth it? But this is running long. So we’ll have to tackle that in Writer’s Craft, Wissenschaft 3: Tokyo Schaft.

In the meantime, always open to hearing what you think. Whether you’ve done one or have some thoughts on it. Is it worth it? And what has your experience been?

Origin Story

It started in kindergarten. My class had to draw a character on a giant sheet of paper. We came up with the creatively named “School Boy.” Just a generic little boy. Nothing creative, nothing noteworthy. Though one guy in my class was really excited to give him red shoes.

After the dust settled, a two-dimensional carcass was sprawled out on the floor. The teacher said the next step would be bringing him to life. To my five-year-old brain, I thought we were going to carry the sheet up to the roof like pallbearers, raise it to the sky, and have lightning strike it, spawning a sick hybrid of Frankenstein and Flat Stanley.

But alas, it wasn’t that fantastical. Though I’d come to learn there was a bit of magic to what we would be tasked to do, we were told to write our own stories about him.

Mine wasn’t anything special. A few indecipherable scribbles of what was meant to be a bear chasing School Boy out of the plane. School Boy survived the jump, with the aid of his magical red shoes. The bear wasn’t as lucky, crash-landing into the woods. It survived the fall only to get chased by a bigger bear. The End.

Between that, I always got called up to read my stories in front of class in elementary school, and by middle school, I had teachers who liked my writing, but didn’t know what to do with their progressively more outré nature. There were high school classes, undergrad classes, but today, I want to focus on my recent endeavours.

Over the years, I had mulled over the decision time and time again, actively skipping a full-time writing program during undergrad because I always had reservations about whether writing could be taught or not. Stacked on top of that was my fear that it would have the opposite impact of siphoning the enjoyment out of the craft.

It took a deep session working on the earliest section of my novel, my mind between the delirium of a writer’s high, and the somnolency deepening with each minute of that late night, for the thought to creep up. “What about a writing program?” Maybe not to learn, but to help set some goals and get a guiding light for the early steps of my novel. And overall, writing is an isolated journey. I find talking about writing to people in your immediate life who aren’t into the craft is akin to having a friend or relative regale you with the banal minutiae of how Little Cecil did the cutest thing when he licked the toilet bowl rim and said it tastes better than Gerber’s. You grin and nod, all while thinking how much you’d rather be swimming in an electrified pool. Or is that just me?

Either way, curiosity won out. I enrolled in one program after another. The result is something I’d like to call: A Tale of Two Mentors. Two guys of a similar age and background, yet two wildly different experiences.

Tale 1: Humble Beginnings at Humber

The Humber program stretched over 8 months. What I liked about it was that each year, they give you a list of mentors you can read a bit about and choose. This gave me the option to see if, at least based on my impressions, anybody featured matched my sensibilities and could offer some valuable advice.

I found such a person in Colin McAdam. His novels are each a few years apart, but what I liked about them was that they were each drastically different from one another, and a little experimental, quite often playing with unique perspectives.

The experience went better than I could have ever imagined. When he gave feedback, it seemed impartial. A perfect blend of him getting what I was going for, pointing out where I could tighten up or fix the prose, and when he was unsure about how effective something was, he would ask me what I was trying to accomplish there. The feedback was always followed up by a phone call.

I’m not sure if he knew it, but I valued our interactions. I was able to further discuss what I meant, with parts, and hash out ways to get where I needed. A major element we worked on was the worldbuilding. My novel is set in a world somewhat similar to ours, but things are slightly askew due to a cataclysmic event. It was alluded to throughout the sections he read, and many of our discussions were on how and when the history of the event should be rolled out.

We discussed topics such as not getting too caught up on what gatekeepers may say, especially when it came to perspectives. He pushed back against restrictive ideas about who’s allowed to write from which perspectives. And sometimes, he’d take me to task if I tried to make things sound a little too inoffensive.

When the program wound to an end, his parting words to me were:

“Stay curious, mischievous and creative. The world needs smart eyes to look at it, to tell it it’s ridiculous, to tell it to fuck off, to tell it it’s full of surprises and fun.” ~ Colin McAdam

It was just what I needed. The experience wasn’t about learning the essentials and tools of writing. It wasn’t about teaching me how to write. It wasn’t about telling me the only way to get out of the woods, but instead, to figure out how to get out of there on my own, even during times when it may not seem to be the safest route.

It would turn out that these skills would be necessary for surviving the academic program that followed.

I’ll cover how they came into play and share my final thoughts on the value of writing programs in the next post: Writer’s Craft, Wissenschaft - Part 2.

So quiet here… Normally, a quiet spot is somewhere I find solace. But if said place is called The Chats of Maldoror, maybe it should feature some form of… chatter. Whether it be inane dialogue or an interminable monologue, words need to be uttered. So I’ll hold up my end of the bargain and fill this up with the raw thoughts shooting out of my head like a mechanical Pez dispenser on the fritz.

And what’s your part of the deal? Absolutely nothing. Though it would be greatly appreciated if you choose to stick around, subscribe, and keep coming back every chance you get. It’s as easy as adding your email address to the space below and hitting Subscribe. You can also bookmark the hub page chatsofmaldoror.com to keep track of it all from one page. The full site will launch on Tuesday, October 14th, 2025.

Still here? If that desperate plea didn’t turn you away, nothing will. So, welcome to The Chats of Maldoror, a digital realm for discussing storytelling across an array of mediums. It’s an evolving entity, a growing realm. Depending on when you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re an early settler to this strange land. If that’s the case, I tip my hat to you while hiding my rations.

So what is this exactly?

Yeah, yeah, the whimsical prose is nice and all, but what does this all mean?

I’ll tell it to you straight. The Chats of Maldoror is a newsletter and media channel about:

• Writer’s Craft (Insights into my process, examinations of others, and analysis of larger theories)

• Literature (often delving into the metafictional, the modernist, the misfit)

• Film & TV (with a taste for the surreal, the satirical, and the sinister)

• Video essays and reviews (Definitely not coming to a theatre near you)

• Ideas (A pretentious way of saying “miscellaneous musings.”)

You’ll find weekly posts here on the Substack relating to such matters and monthly video essays. At heart, this is an exploration of narrative: what stories do to us, what they hide from us, how they shape our sense of reality. If that sounds like a conspiracy theory, good. That means you’re starting to get it.

What you can expect

Over the next few weeks, you’ll see:

• Posts on topics like unpacking the Russian-nesting doll we know as metafiction, can satire survive in a post-truth world, and whether or not getting an MA/MFA in Creative Writing is worth it.

• Deep dives into novels by authors like Nabokov, Calvino, Vonnegut, and others who have written themselves into the maze.

• Film essays on works like Adaptation, Barton Fink, and Mother Night (movies about the cost of telling stories).

• General reviews of what I’ve been watching, reading, playing, and everything in between.

• As time goes on, I’m looking to expand it into a podcast. A place to chat with writers and creatives, established and burgeoning, about the craft and whatever they have on their minds.

What’s a “Maldoror”?

Easy one. It comes from Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, a fever dream of a book. One that helped birth surrealism. Because it reminds us that not all literature exists to comfort or explain. Some stories want to dismember you. Some truths might leave even your favourite conspiracy theorist gasping for air.

So I thought a little play on words felt refreshing.

And who am I?

Maybe you know the real me, maybe you’ve known me by other aliases, or maybe you had no idea of my existence, and you’re utterly perplexed as to why you’re still here when you could be watching cat videos, slop, or gorging on algorithmic polarization. Hmm… Can’t blame you. I’ll probably seek those out when I’m done here.

Therefore, I’ll keep this short. I’m Thaddeus Awotunde, just a guy who loves writing and storytelling. I’m in the middle of working on a novel, and want to create a dialogue in a world where the appreciation for storytelling and a comprehension of the mechanics of media literacy are on the wane. Hopefully, in enough time, you’ll get to know as much about me as you need to.

So stick around, subscribe, who knows, maybe I’ll even see you in a chat!