Creative Writing

During my last semester of college I had a few hours that I got to fill with elective classes. I had heard good things about the professor who taught Creative Writing and so I signed up for the class without too much thought about the content of the class or what it would require of me. Little did I know when I signed up that the Creative Writing class would be one of the hardest of my entire college experience.

I entered the class on the first day of the semester and was surrounded by what appeared to be all English and Art double majors. I tried to shake the fact that I was surrounded by people who write excessive amounts of poetry and gripping short stories for fun, but I just couldn't do it. In my mind all I could think about was the inevitable failures that were to come as I glanced at the syllabus of assignments for the months ahead. I even calculated my credits for graduation on the evening after that first class to see if there was any way that I could graduate without taking Creative Writing class.

Because I needed the credits, and quite honestly because I was intrigued by my classmates, I entered the classroom on the second day of class and on each day that Creative Writing met for the entire semester. It proved to be the most challenging classroom of my education. Each time I entered it was with a mixture of fear and excitement. I felt fear because I knew that each day things were required of me in Creative Writing that I had never experienced before, yet I was excited because I had so rarely been challenged to think, really think, before.

The first half of the semester Creative Writing was focused entirely on poetry. I spent many late nights and many tear filled afternoons working on writing poems. It didn't come easily for me like it did for all of my classmates. Poetry was what naturally came from their mouths everytime they talked. I was certainly not used to making my words sound beautiful or intentional. The goal of our poetry section in Creative Writing was to come up with ten polished poems that each met different requirements.

After the torture of poetry we moved on to writing short stories and scripts. This half of Creative Writing class proved no less challenging for me. I struggled every day until the last assignment had been turned in.

In the end, Creative Writing was not only the most difficult class I had ever taken, it was also my favorite.