Essay topic 2: Overall description of your learning experience in LITR 3731 Creative Writing and its potential applications to your writing / teaching career.

Rachel Barton

It’s Not Every Semester…

It’s not every semester that I sign up for class that I thoroughly enjoy in every way.  However, creative writing was one such class.  The first thing about it that struck me as delightful was the personality of the instructor and the overall character of the class itself.  After participating in the first few workshops—which were those of poetry—I found that this class in particular had contained a diverse mixture of people with wonderful personalities, skills, and stories to tell.  As I got to know some of the people in the room and had the chance to aid them in critiquing their work, I also learned about my own skills as a writer simultaneously.  I ended up gaining a new appreciation for understanding the conventions of writing, reading, and critiquing literature from attending class and studying the assigned readings.  Before attending the class, I really did not have much of a background in the conventions of creative writing.  However, now that I have completed the course, I feel much more confident that I have the ability to write creatively.  I think that this course has had a profound effect on how I view and approach creative writing versus analytical writing.  I feel that I was able to extract a good portion of knowledge from the course.

            First and foremost, I learned that producing a good work of either poetry or fiction takes a substantial amount of time to write and revise.  As difficult as it was to get started and to determine the direction of the piece, I really did enjoy writing my fiction manuscript.  Even though it was only a chapter in a greater work I have yet to continue in my spare time, I like earning how to piece it together with all of the elements I learned about from the readings in Three Genres.  One of the many important things I learned from my assigned readings in the textbook was how to develop a persona.  I like the way the author describes writing fiction and dealing with personas on page 146.  He writes that “as writers of fiction, we are free to present our material through the eyes of a persona, someone who may be quite unlike us.  A story or novel cannot be criticized for being untrue; it is judged on whether it seems true.”  This is exactly what I tried to accomplish in writing my work.  I actually decided to write from the perspective of a girl who is quite the opposite of me, as she examines someone whose artistic characteristics are more like my own.  I like the fact that fictional literature allows the writer to create a personality by sometimes combining different facets from the people he or she daily encounters or knows from the past.

            Another important concept that I found during this course was that I could invent interesting character with potential.  In class, we talked about using true aspects of your own life to create a story, while modifying it according to your imagination.  At first, I thought my life was too mundane and boring to draw any type of interesting story from.  I identified with what Minot says on page 146 of the textbook: “Some beginning writers feel that their lives have been too ordinary, but everyone has had complex relationships with parents or foster parents, everyone has had to deal with people their own age, everyone has had defeats, successes, and learning experiences.”  And, I agreed with his ending statement: “Every experience is unique.”  After reading this, I realized that I did have some memories of people and places that were interesting and aspects of my personality that I could include into my story.  I found freedom in the fact that I didn’t need to include every detail; I could edit parts of my own memories to fit the story. 

Altogether, this creative writing class has taught me that, when creating a written work of art, the writer would do well to keep in mind that “fiction is not a diary entry even if it is written to resemble one; fiction is an artistic creation with its own sense of unity and significance” (Minot 147).  I think this course and the instructor, Dr. White, helped me develop and further improve my creative writing skills and allowed me to see a future in continuing to write poetry and fiction.  I gained an appreciation and affinity for writing both fiction and poetry, and enjoyed participating in class discussion—which were very valuable experiences for me.  It’s not every semester that I get to be involved in such a genuinely enjoyable class.