Why creative writing? Most people assume every writer aspires to become famous, placing us usually introverted characters next to the outgoing actors and theater buffs. The most obvious difference is placement. Writers create the world, actors live in it. So we could say writers like playing god, but we won’t veer too far into cynicism.

A professor of mine that I greatly admire often tells his students that creative writing is a silly major in college. And to an extent, it is. The genre offers so much freedom that you could say a writer could get away with anything, it’s an easy slide. It’s when this lifestyle becomes something you not only want to do but need to do, this is when it is no longer silly.

I was about nine years old when I wrote my first poem, it was a standard two line rhyme pattern about a beloved kindergarten teacher that had passed away. I read it at a school assembly, and although I have terrible stage fright, the words so naturally swam out to touch the crowd in front of me. I went through many stages of “when I grow up I want to be…”, but literature never left my interests.

Let’s take a step back and think about what exactly one could do with writing. As a broad subject, there is always teaching. But teaching should be left to those who actually want to teach, but those you “can’t do”. Writing skills are also implemented in editorials for magazines, newspapers, and journals like the Odyssey! Now without being so literal (pun intended), a writer can extend their skills to other worlds, a beautiful thing: writing for film scripts, scientific journalism, news journalism, lyricism, advertisement, landscape, self-help philosophies, and then the ever forgotten letter writing. So if you think about it, a writer could really enter any field they can write about. Another god-like ability!

Another teacher of mine, my journalism editor in high school, told me that being a writer is a miserable life, because we are not the lucky ones. We are not the scientists that humanity will always need, and we do not write for humanity at all. We write for ourselves, to be heard, in our own voice, in our own time. Even when writing outside of those constricts, writing as someone else from somewhere you’ve never heard of, only you will ever write it the way you will.

I can’t recall the exact moment when I realized the life I would lead, but I do remember my junior year I took my first creative writing class and feeling so intimate with the subject that I couldn’t imagine a life without it.

Whether it’s escapism, expression, or a need to be heard, writing finds and chooses you, and when you realize this, you can’t fight it. It becomes a need, it becomes you. I was warned not to make each of my creations a part of myself. But when you really mean the things you say, it’s hard not to call even a short jot of notes a piece of your soul. So perhaps, in this way, my professor was right; we are silly to strive for such a lifestyle. Constructing and deconstructing and reconstructing yourself over and over again each time you say something. In fact, through the progress of this article, I have become cynical, as I promised I wouldn’t. That’s another factor which separates this art from those hard sciences; you constantly change with they way you write. How fragile a writer is.

So why creative writing? Because although poetry is a dying art, it will last for eternity. Art and meaning are forever changing, but words will always exist. I write because I thrive to be understood and to understand. I write because I dream of other places to be, where I may never go. I write because language is universal, and even though paper pages have turned into electronic data, humanity is built to speak to each other. I write despite knowing how it sounds to have a degree in “poetry” (“What will she do with that? Where will she work??”), I’m working towards my full potential - something 80% of the population is not. And although I might never be the best, I will be where I need to be, doing what I need to do.

And of course, there’s always becoming a grammar addict and mooching fame off of a renowned writer!