LITR 3731: Creative Writing
Sample Final Exam 2005
Andrea Cox
I am a behavioral science major and needed an elective to fill in for my degree plan. I took creative writing on the assumption that it would help me with future writing in the psychology field. One of the first places a person, who wants to learn to write better, looks to for assistance, is a creative writing class. It provides a new atmosphere of ways of learning, offers a new perceptive on writing, and it involves public display of work one is working on. It also provides a way to meet new people within the field of literature. The class revolved around a trial and error workshop. If you wrote the perfect piece great. It is highly unlikely to write the perfect piece that is where the error comes in and you learn about revisions. And I mean REVISIONS. The text, Dr. White, and the presentations taught me a lot about myself and my writing.
The Three Genres: The writing of Poetry, Fiction, and Drama. 7th edition provides a great range of material from literary contents to arrangements of writing techniques. Reading and writing takes energy, imagination, patience, and understanding. Tina Hergenrader, an author of adolescent books, said that writing is work, a full time job, but don’t give up. You have to use your imagination in order to present a great best seller. The most significant learning experience of this class was the idea that came from Minot that said start with a familiar solid concept. Be it from your personal life or someone else’s. That is where a person gets the start for a good piece of literature. This concept can create a piece of literature related to fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama. One good concept can be used for many genres of literature.
The Three Genres offers a wide range of poems and stories to the reader to visually enhance each lesson that Minot is trying to get across. Minot included in his text literary instructions for his teaching materials, this included guidelines for students on literary background, specific information on how to accomplish a better piece of work, critical elements of creating, analyzing and offered ways in helping writers work through their “one way” ideas. A great example of one way thinking on my part was presented in the writing we were assigned to do for this class: a poem.
In the poem titled “Teddy Bear”, I thought that sing song rhythm was the only way an amateur could write. In Minot’s chapter 3, page 52-54, he says to stay away from this rhythm and be more creative. Sing song has been done forever and are clichés. So the first draft of my poem was just that a sing song version. Well, after many critiques of three revisions it is still a little on the sing song rhyming scale but have a format that gives it some character and individuality. The lesson is that there is more than one way for an amateur to write a poem.
There is always a lot of pressure on an individual when taking a writing class. Your personal work is read aloud or reviewed by peers. You are graded on what you think is superb work and yet you found out that it is really “crappy.” The most intimidating part is when you are in a class full of literature majors and this is your first class ever in literature. This creative writing class was put in a workshop style class and I will tell you there is a lot of pressure on the writers and the readers; however, it seems you learn that everyone is in the same boat. Even those who have been in literature for years are still learning new techniques. It takes hard work and practice to produce a best seller.
The workshop experience offered one on one help through peer review, public speaking, the ability to share ideas with others, it created a way to get over some of the fear of personal writing, and it help teach in a better fashion some of the techniques that were being explained in the text. The fiction piece is an example of what can be created by participating in a workshop. My fiction piece titled “In too deep,” was based on a true story. I started with a solid concept and moved on from there. However, because it was a true story dealing with actual events that happened to my father, the character development of Anderson was great. Need a say that the other characters seemed lacking. By being able to read my piece to the class I was given feed back that help develop my characters in a new light and was able to give them a life of there own. Without peer review and Dr. White’s assistance those characters would still be a shadow of existence.
The most difficult time I have with writing is the need to quit and throw the piece away. The subject, tone, concept, scene, or even the whole of the story becomes tedious and too infuriating to complete. Minot in chapter 17, points out that when you have trouble writing turn to the first aid steps. Never throw away a draft for you may have use of it later and when you get writers block put the paper away for when you read it next it may read differently than it did the day before. When assigned the drama for the class we were given the scene and characters up front; however, I had never attempted to write anything other than poetry. With the knowledge from Dr. White and the text I created a piece that was given to comedy about a girl that went into labor during our final.
Two months it took me to write that piece. I wrote, crumbled, and threw away more pieces of paper than I care to count. But in the end I was the one going through the trash because there was always that one line that worked to perfection. My shortcoming in writing apparently is drama. It took me just a mere few days to write the other pieces for the class put two months for the drama. I took into consideration all I have read and learned and when I became frustrated put down the drama and reviewed it at a later date. I worked to my advantage.
Throughout the text, Dr. White’s lectures and Tina’s presentation to the class the one thing that was repeated over and over was practice. It is a guarantee that if nothing else was acquired through the experience of this class, practice is the one thing that will keep me working on writing. I will take the experience from this workshop on to the master’s program and through my future career. My future is in helping people and the need for communication will be great whether it is through writing or verbal communication. Either way as I develop more in my writing and other skills I will take with me the knowledge that literature provides a person with many different genres of life.