Creative Writing

I decided to enroll in a Creative Fiction Writing class that's offered this semester at the college where I work. I can audit it or take it for credit, so I decided to audit because I won't have the pressure of trying to come up with something for a grade. It will leave me free to be more creative without having to worry about it. I've found that when I'm writing poetry or whatever it is, it's not going to come until it's ready anyway. Just because someone says write a poem by tomorrow doesn't mean that I'm going to be able to write a poem if it's not there waiting to be written. I can't just write a poem or story on command.

I was a little concerned about what I was going to write about until we got our first assignment. One of them was to describe the floor plan of a house we remembered as a child. Take someone through it like you were a tour guide and describe some of its history. The other one was to write a short story based on an experience and the textbook gave several topic suggestions. One of the topics was "a bad haircut". That was the one I decided to write about. It was a real experience that happened to me in my early twenties. I had always had long hair, and I decided to go a little shorter. I came out of the beauty shop with my hair so short I thought I looked like a man. I guess everyone else liked it because they said they did. I took them at their word and forgot about it. After all, it eventually grew out anyway. It was pretty traumatic at the time, though.

I didn't think I knew anything to write about, but once I got started the words just started flowing like water and I couldn't write fast enough. I thought I would just type it into my word processing program on my computer at home instead of trying to write it by hand, and the program started acting all funky by deleting letters when I went back to insert things. I figured out that my insert key was on and I had to turn it off. After that things went better.

I think I'm going to enjoy the class, but one of my friends is taking bets on how many classes I'll actually attend before I decide not to go back. I ended up not going back to the poetry class about halfway into the semester. I think the reason was because they weren't talking about anything I was interested in. I guess I just wanted to write poetry and we ended up talking about some of the different forms of poetry, etc. Also, we were critiquing each others work. I can handle constructive criticism, but one of the students in the class was pretty rude and crude in his assessment of others' work, in spite of the fact that the instructor had told him many times to stop doing that. Then there were a few others who bit back by more boldly criticizing his work. It just got to be more of a chore to go to class, than something I really enjoyed. I actually started trying to think of excuses not to go.

I remember doing the same thing in oil painting class. It was a very long class (about 3 1/2 hours) after working all day. It was really hard to work up the enthusiasm to go do that when I was tired and just wanted to go home. I never thought I was good at oil painting anyway.

In light of my attendance record in former classes, I guess my friend has a pretty good reason to doubt that I'll follow through on this class. Hopefully I will unless I begin to feel like I'm failing in my attempts to do well. I think that's what happened with the poetry class and the oil painting class. After awhile I just began to wonder what in the world I was doing in those classes when I didn't have any creative ability to do it. One thing I'm going to have to stop doing is comparing myself to others' work. I have a really hard time with that. I need to just pay attention to what I'm doing and say that what I'm doing is fine. It may not be the same or as good as what someone else is doing, but that's fine. It's mine and it's what I'm doing, good or bad.