#if i had stuck with english as my major i would have written a doozy of a thesis on hetty sorrel and tess durbeyfield | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

exile-wrath · 7 years

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Athanatosora told me that you (probably) took creative writing in college. Can you share your experiences with it?

@athanatosora you fucker how dare you make me remember this

uhhh oh boy where do I begin. kay, well for one, I go to community college, and creative writing courses are open to anyone, not just english majors. I took intro, fiction writing, and poetry writing. It’s probably a different experience than a proper uni

students I encountered:

people looking for easy humanities credits

this one lady that enrolled by mistake but was really talented at writing and had great skill with placing the reader in the setting. her descriptions style was just so good. needed to work on her dialogue but I loved her stuff I think I still have some.

Aspiring Hollywood Scriptwriter White Guys who had like. decent ideas. awful execution. a workshop piece that reeked of misogyny and got eviscerated for it by one of my friends.

this dude that had a lazy drawl and whose writing made me go ??? bc the main character of his workshop piece was all about exploring sexuality and I’m ace and literally everything about that piece went over my fucking head. it might have been the writing style. It was 50% the overwinded descriptions and 50% the completely unnecessary masturbation description. His writing reminded me of James Joyce and I hate James Joyce.

people like London and Casey who I both met in creative writing classes. AKA, serious writers that actually have sold their soul to the words. Their existence helped me get through. I still remember their workshop pieces because they were worth remembering.

People who were exploring writing as something new to do. Beginning baby writers whose work made me war flashback to when I first started writing. Their enthusiasm levels and talent levels varied per person but they weren’t terrible to be around bc they were honestly trying.

And then there was:

Me: passionate about writing as my future career and the one (1) thing I’m good at and like to do. At that point I’d been writing for 4-5 years.

Intro to Creative Writing spent half the time on poetry and half on prose. It was. boring. We covered really basic things like point of view, description exercises, and... nothing that really stuck out. It was definitely more catered to students that had spent all their life writing essays and never writing for fun. I snoozed a lot because I knew everything that was being covered bc I’d been writing longer than most people in that class. It was barely engaging. It focused a lot more on the technical aspects of writing, and I just... found it really boring.

About at some point in the semester, we started doing workshop pieces! Basically we would write a thing, pick a date to be workshopped, distribute copies to everyone the week before, and on the workshop day you got to sit quietly while people discussed your piece, what they liked, what stood out, what sort of meanings they picked up, critique they had, anything.

Workshop was uhhhh a doozy. We had to write up 1 page critiques each of them? And a lot of the time I was left reading a workshop piece and having nothing to say because I couldn’t think of anything nice or substantial to say. Oh god I think I still have the google doc with all my written critiques

some things from my critique document:

77 words on a bag is a bit... much

Don’t ‘list’ actions like a grocery list, it gets boring.

The last paragraph, which the narrator drives off into the sunset, I thought felt off. It feels rushed, and even though he says he’s relieved, there’s not much to indicate it in his thoughts? Mention how it felt good to finally blow off steam. How nice to finally stop giving a fuck. What’s the significance of the song that starts playing over the radio? Maybe give us the one-two lines that resonate with the narrator as he feels free again. I don’t know the song, so I didn’t get what sort of impact it was supposed to have.

W-what tense are you trying to use. The beginning paragraph is a confusing mess of past and present and like what. /overall the whole thing confuses me; why are they talking about things in a public setting where anyone could hear, why is this girl trying to indoctrinate this guy when she’s also trying to blackmail him, that doesn’t make sense, other than their clothing, what do they look like. I just have so many questions, and no answers??

Unfortunately the worldbuilding paragraph at the beginning felt almost like a crutch, explaining things rather than you trying to fit it into the story itself.

Okay. Lot’s of description about things, clothes and place and such, I do admit. But it feels a bit excessive and almost poetic in the way that I just. Flop. //flops out

The key thing that’s missing here is the lack of plot. No conflict, no purpose to the characters. They’re just walking and blandly commenting on strange things that they pass by. What’s... the point?? There is none. I see none. My eyes roll to the back of my head, my head turns upside-down, my body inverts, because WHERE IS THE PLOOOOT. So yeah. Add a plot. Will 100% help.

If I had to be honest, the cringe was a bit strong here. You try to use strong imagery in order to get it across to the reader, yet it somewhat backfires. It’s incredibly detail-heavy, simply swamping us with details to build the scene, yet it’s way too much sensory detail. The plot is completely halted in order to simply build the scene. It was quite tedious to read.

Ao probably neglected to tell you that I screamed about writing crits A LOT. These are some of the Bad bits from my crit though. There were definitely really good pieces, but there were also the really “what did I do to deserve this” pieces.

Okay this post is getting long but ANYWAY Creative Writing class is a doozy. Don’t go in expecting that everyone will be at the same skill level. It was somewhat fun because of the people I met, but it was a lot of reading and writing in a certain way that the teacher wanted us to. They’re good, I think, for learning technical skills, but will barely help otherwise. Trying to write creatively for a class can be killer on inspiration levels though, because the moment I had to write for an assignment rather than my own enjoyment I regretted taking it.

#asks #personal #god it was a trip. not necessarily a fun one either.#workshops were fun though #Anonymous

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