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

Alana Nesturuk

 . . . I was most excited about the fiction assignment.  I wanted to make my fiction piece so great, but it was a lot harder than I thought. It took me forever to decide what I wanted to write about and since I was dealing with my Mother being in the hospital that was what was most on my mind. I figured it would be easiest to write about the thing that I was thinking about most, even if it was a sad thing. I think deciding what to write about was probably the hardest thing for me; however, it didn’t get much easier from there either. Typing out my story and coming up with ideas wasn’t the hard part. What I found to be difficult was to organize the story, and put the dialogue in at the right time. I also had trouble with making all of it clear to a first time reader. The only way I can describe this is to say that when you are the writer, and everything is in your head, it’s hard to be sure you’ve said everything that needed to be said. If you’ve left something out, it’s hard to tell because you already know everything you’ve wanted to say.

 For example, in the story, Escapes, from the text, Three Genres, The narrator, Caryn, tells us so much about the character Jennifer. I felt like I knew everything about her and about what was going on. The author, Ann Hood, didn’t use an entire page to describe Jennifer and bore us to death; she dropped things in here and there, but so smoothly. When I read Escapes, I read it different than stories I’ve read before. I was writing, so I was reading like a writer. The story was perfect in my eyes and I realized how imperfect mine was. I wasn’t such a great writer after all. I have a better appreciation for writers because of this class. Writing isn’t as easy as I had once thought. I mean, to really construct a good story is very difficult. I underestimated the amount of time that writers put into their work. I agree with what Karen Daniel said in her 2005 final exam essay, “The most profound discovery for me was finding out that creative writing is hard work for everyone.  I am an avid reader, and the knowledge that what I read in a day can take months or years to write is humbling.”

Escapes, was probably not easy to write for Ann Hood either. There is no telling how much time she spent on writing her story and we read it in ten minutes! If I never write again, one thing I have learned is to appreciate those who do because it takes a lot of work and dedication to get it right.