A lot of English majors like to write. It’s an almost given fact about the major itself. If you want to write, you go into English. But what happens when you just can’t bring yourself to write? No matter how hard I try, I can never get a viable story to magically appear on my computer screen.
Strange, yes. I can write articles and critical theory papers until I’m blue in the face. I can write pages and pages on my favorite characters, their nuances and what they stand for with no issue. However, place me in front of a computer for any type of creative writing and I have an issue.
It’s not for lack of trying either. It started in high school with a project that my English teacher had everyone do. It was something crazy like 72 poems with a bunch of different forms. From haikus to limericks to a couple of free forms, even a sonnet thrown in for effect. Because of the structure, that was relatively easy. I got through it and vowed to never again write another poem because I just didn’t get how to write poetry.
Everyone goes through an introduction course to creative writing, where you have to write a short story, probably a poem, and a few other things. Then you workshop these pieces until they’re almost indistinguishable from the original. I did well enough – of course this class was all about the beginning steps where it didn’t matter if it was good or not. I had a few hits with a poem and short story I wrote, two things I’m pretty proud of.
And then I tried a poetry writing class. And this was hard; harder than any of my critical theory classes, harder than my interpretation of literature classes. We had to write a different poem each week. Yes, we had prompts and workshop classes and it wasn’t like we were just dropped into writing poetry and had to figure everything out. But my head spun with all the new types of poems I was learning. Ghazals with their strange patterns, poems with slant rhymes and end rhymes and no rhymes that still seemed to rhyme. I think I was partially intimidated too. There were people in this class that were just plain good at coming up with new poems each week. Dizzyingly good, I drank that in like I was in a desert and those poems were water. I tried to learn from them, and I had a couple of successes that I really enjoyed sharing, but most of the time I didn’t like the end result.
Then, I found the key part for me to write poetry. It was part desperation, where the deadline was rushing up to meet my face head on like a brick wall, part inspiration from seemingly ordinary objects. One night, I watched the news and wrote a poem about things that were being talked about. Another night was after I went up to New York City and saw Aladdin on Broadway. One was about my mother after I flailed around trying to find something to write about.
I guess the moral of the story is to keep at it even though you think you suck. Creative writing is a muscle that needs to be stretched and grown and exercised just like a leg muscle or any other sort of ability. So I guess that means it’s time for me to get back to that book I abandoned five millennia ago and try to write the characters all over again.
