As an author, English professor Matthew Vollmer understands that research is an important part of writing any piece. For the title story of his soon-to-be-published collection of short stories, "Future Missionaries of America," his search found him with a learning tool he never thought he'd be researching. The story features a teenage girl who is assigned by one of her classes to look after a robotic baby with her friend who is a fundamentalist Christian. Though she herself is not spiritual, she has feelings for this boy who plans to be a missionary as soon as he graduates.
"For the title story," said Vollmer, "I was talking about robotic babies. There's this thing called real baby, I think it's called real baby; I can't remember what it's called, but there's a company that makes these things and I asked them (to borrow one). Because I was an educator they sent me this DVD and this booklet that had a cross-section view of the baby and how it was used and all the products you could buy for it and how it could be programmed. That was really helpful."
Vollmer is among the many teachers at Virginia Tech who are also published authors. He teaches creative writing and freshman English and helps graduate teaching assistants. He started writing his first story for the collection in 1997, and by 2001 had enough for a collection but did not feel it was quite ready to be sent out.
To test the story's worth, Vollmer would send a newly finished story to multiple literary magazines to see whether they would be accepted. Institutions such as "The New Yorker Review," "Paris Review" and "Tin House" show the worth of authors' writing by deciding to let them into their pages. All the stories in Vollmer's collection -- except for one -- have been published in such types of literary magazines.
"With a story collection ... it's sort of different because most of these stories have been through a vetting process where they get sent to a magazine," Vollmer said. "Some of the editors actually edit the story, and some editors will be like, 'OK, I'm just taking this story,' and they just put it in there the way it is."
This process of proving a piece's worth is similar in the screenplay world. Carl Bean, who also teaches creative writing, has been exclusively focused on filmmaking and screenplay writing in the last few years. Already a published author of several novels, he is currently working on a film documentary about Edgar Allan Poe with an undergraduate student that is slated for completion by the end of the semester. He is also enrolled in a professional certificate course in the New School in New York City and participates in workshops at the Film Institute in Maryland.
To see whether a screenplay has promise, screenwriters enter them into contests.
"For screenwriters, you either go to a famous film screenwriting school and then someone there says, 'Here's an inside,' or you have to go through the steps and go through contests and things like that," Bean said.
One of Bean's screenplays, titled "Flight," has been seeing positive results in recent contests.
"I've been doing pretty well," Bean said. "I've won a couple of monthly contests, but I haven't won a major big contest, but I've placed in some major contests."
If a screenplay shows enough potential, a production company will pick up the writer. Most of the time, the company expects an author to come with a substantial amount of prime material. According to Bean, the number is around 10, with each screenplay consisting of a full 120 pages; each page equates to a minute of film.
"Why I was drawn to screenplays," Bean said, "is because there's no room to play. You have to have a good story, but you don't have unlimited room to tell that story. You have to tell it within a certain space, and things have to happen within that space at certain times, and you have maybe a minute to two minutes to make it happen."
This restricting challenge presented by film is similar to another medium: The graphic novel. John Boyer, who teaches both World Regions and Geography of Wine, has recently released a comic book featuring the hero The Plaid Avenger, a familiar looking college professor by day who is a bumbling, half party boy, half powerless superhero by night. In the comic book, the Avenger slips into current global situations on a mission and subsequently explains to the reader the event. The catch: He can never actually affect current events because it would make the story false.
"It's the first of its kind. It's an educational comic book," said Boyer. "So I have to craft a lesson. With graphic art, it's all about succinctness, with the education and the writing; it's going to be tight. That's a lot harder than just spewing everything out that you wanted to say."
The Plaid Avenger is also the host of Boyer's World Regions textbook, which he wrote and student editors subsequently edited. Boyer's approach to writing the book was slightly different from most textbooks.
"This is a very unconventional book," Boyer said. "I mean, it's horrible. I'm the first to admit it, but it's from the heart. I just said, 'Well let's just do this. What can I do to make sure that it's not like any other textbook?' Will people learn from me, something about the way that I speak, talk, whatever, yell, scream, that's what people remembered. People have been telling me this for a long time. So I decided, 'I'm going to write the whole fucking book in the first person.' I'm just going to talk the book, so I did."
Boyer believes that the stream of consciousness writing approach for the textbook gives students a breath of fresh air when it comes to learning.
"I've just never bought into the academic principle that everything has to be hard in order for you to learn it," Boyer said.
"It is written in the vernacular," he said. "There is swearing in it and references to alcohol and stuff like that, but its part of the character. There are those detractors, but the vast majority of people, I think -- I've never done a survey -- but the vast majority of people seem to really like it. I get way more fan mail than hate mail."
When comparing Boyer to The Plaid Avenger, it is not hard to see where the inspiration for the design of that particular character came from. As far as how much of himself he sees in the Plaid Avenger?
"Say 50-50. All of his bad traits, I possess," Boyer said.