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

Mallory Rogers

An Unexpected Surprise

            Whenever I first was browsing through the catalog for classes this semester I ended up, like always, focused on the Literature courses because it is my degree’s concentration.  When I came to creative writing, it was almost a given to go ahead and snatch a spot while there were still openings.  Although I didn’t have a whole heck of a lot experience with writing in general, the workshop portion of the class in the description sounded like something that I would like to try out.  I’m a big believe in “edit, edit, edit,” so I knew that this was a good opportunity to not only try something new and different like the workshops, but also to come away with a piece that had been worked, shared, and edited to make more pleasing in the end. Most of my writing involved analyzing and interpretations so I was excited to be given the chance to do something different, while still getting credit towards my degree.  Because I had never been given the opportunity to write creatively, I never really felt the need, or the challenge, to do so until this class.  While I wasn’t positive what I was getting into, I was ready to get in, buckle the seatbelt, and go for a ride. 

One of the most important aspects of writing I learned through this class, other than to edit and revise numerous times, is about the discovery as a writer in a developing a piece.  According to Three Genres, when developing a story it is equally important to think about what you don’t want to write about as it is to consider what you do want to.  While some “inventions” seem to be just that, in closer evaluation of the writing, it comes across that the people and places aren’t made up really at all.  Instead, they are spin-offs and recreations of people and things that you have come across in life at some point in time that happened to be memorable for any number of reasons.  It’s not so much what general ideas you put in your pieces, but rather how you transform them to work within the piece.  “Transformation of details in the initial stages of planning can lead to anywhere,” according to Minot.  This was the case for me considering my fiction piece.  I took pieces and events and even people from my everyday life and used them to ‘discover’ my story and add depth to situations and characters.  On page 262, Minot says that, “If you remain flexible, you will discover more about your characters with each new draft.”  I took my newfound skill and used it when writing my fiction piece. 

While pleased with the way the fiction submission had come together, I was practically scared to death to hear what my peers had to say about it.  Getting feedback from an instructor is a very different situation than relying on what classmates will say about your writing, to your face! Peers tend to be less nice, for lack of a better term, and that can make reading aloud your five-page, fabulous piece that you’ve worked for a whole week an anxious and unpredictable experience.  Not knowing what to expect by being one of the first fiction authors, I raced through my paper hoping for the experience to be quick, dealt with, and over.  What I ended up leaving the class with, though, was a whole other story.  As I read through each draft that was returned to me, I eventually got to the point to where I welcomed the criticism and actually looked forward to receiving feedback that would essentially help me to pump out a better draft.

Unfortunately for me, I liked how the workshop panned out for my experience but felt like maybe I should have contributed more for others.  Like Jonathan Moeller, I too found it difficult to criticize my peers, because I felt that maybe I hadn’t known anymore than they did to write and not get it right.  Even though I was hesitant to speak up at times, there were students who weren’t and I think that this is really what the workshop environment is about.  The more I saw my peers opening up and offering advice, even if it wasn’t perfect or used, the more comfortable I too felt in speaking up and getting my ideas at least on the table to be heard. 

The text that we used, Three Genres, was immensely helpful with the clarification of reasoning and also the introduction of techniques that can be used to make writing better and more inquisitive overall.  I thought that each chapter brought up interesting, and sometimes even new techniques, like the onion layers for example, that could be used in not only producing pieces but also to teach creative writing.