For as long as I can remember, I have loved to write. In a lot of ways, I have loved writing for far longer than I have loved reading. As a kid, I would spend hours jotting down my own stories in notebooks. I would lay awake at night thinking about all the possibilities for my stories and where I wanted things to go. I’ll be the first to admit that none of those stories were anything new, creative, or good, but they gave me a great outlet to express my creativity.
As I got older, I wrote less and less. School took up lots of my time. I focused all my time on keeping my grades up. I was a varsity athlete. I also managed the boys’ swim team. I had so much going on that I didn’t have time to let my creative juices create more than just the basic premise of a story in my mind. It sucked because so much of me wanted to write but I just couldn’t. Eventually, senior year rolled around and the biggest decision of my life so far appeared in front of me: where would I choose to go to school and what would I major in. I applied to seven different schools, all of which had English programs, but my biggest desire was to go to a school with a creative writing program. I am very fortunate that my parents supported my desire to major in creative writing. They wanted me to enjoy my time in college and go after something I am passionate about. I picked Seattle U for a handful of reasons: 1) it was close to home and 2) it had a creative writing program. From that moment that I confirmed my enrollment, I felt like I was on the right track. Let’s fast-forward to this year. I am currently taking my first creative writing class since seventh grade. The objective of the course is to create a text adaptation based off a physical piece of art (a movie, painting, photograph, music video, etc.) In a lot of ways, I thought that this would be a breeze. I would view the physical piece of art as a prompt and I would have to write whatever I wanted as long as it referred to the original piece, however, I was very wrong. For about the last six years, I have written purely academic papers. The mindset of academic papers is so vastly different from the mindset of a creative story. I was going from writing true, hard evidence writing to writing where I could make everything up and no one could tell me it was wrong since it was all my original idea; from structure to absolute autonomy. In a lot of ways, it was scary and it made me doubt my abilities, but I knew I had to do it because I didn’t really have a choice. I started off by choosing an art piece that I was very interested in. I chose The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli. The painting is dark, ominous, and has lots of elements to use to spin a good story. I had never written a horror/thriller story before without some type of prompt, so I thought it would be something new and fun to try as I got reacquainted with creative writing. I was constantly reminding myself to take it easy and recognize that this probably wasn’t going to be my best work after not writing a creative story in so long. This story didn’t have to be groundbreaking or award-winning; I simply needed something to turn in and I could go from there. I also held myself responsible for holding back on how often I went back, deleted, and then rewrote things. I knew that if I was constantly going back and forth, I was going to be too harsh on myself and I knew I would never be happy with it. Holding myself to these things and being gentle with myself was super helpful. I enjoyed writing the assignment and even got really good feedback about it when my classmates read it. I know that I still have far to go, but in so many ways, I think I am finally back to what I want.
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January 2024
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