I'm an English major and am thusly taking a Creative Writing course. Specifically, a fiction class.

Our main project for the assignment is to write a novel. Actually, it's more of a novella, since it'll probably end up being under 100 pages, but still, the longest thing anyone in my class has ever written. My professor decided to make it into a race and have everyone begin the class after spring break resumed and have it turned in exactly 30 days later. The threshold for an A is 25,000 words, but he would prefer our stories closer to the 30,000+ word range.

Luckily, as someone who has been an avid reader for most of her life, I have had an idea for a story I've mentally nurtured since my freshman year of high school. Unfortunately, most of my classmates have had to come up with ideas out of thin air.

So I've been writing approximately 1,000 words every day for about two weeks, and last night hit my largest milestone to date: the halfway point. My little word counter read 15,068 when I closed my laptop last night, and it felt like a runner who had shaved a minute of their mile. My writing muscles have gotten stronger than my physical ones have from sitting and typing all day, but who cares? I'm an English major. And it feels awesome.

My writing has mostly been solidifying details and short daydreams I've had about my characters for the last five or so years, like the way the protagonist's mother's boyfriend left her for a man because he didn't have the courage to say it to her face, or how the main character has to hide his distraught and drunken female friend as a conservative vigilante floormate makes his rounds.

A few classmates have asked what my story is about, it's really just a sappy girl-next-door, high-school-turned-college love story and I don't want to confess that, so I just say it's a love story. Tried and true, but still lovable and entertaining, which is probably why I've been thinking about it for so long and haven't burnt out of it.

Having this assignment has forced me to bring my daydreams to fruition by typing them onto paper and manifesting them in the physical world — not something I've ever done with a story for fun. I'm more of an academic/non-fiction writer because it's what I know. Popular writing is too unknown and unstructured for my personal liking. I'm too afraid I'll be bad at it, so I stick with reports and summaries and analysis of ideas and happenings that I can't be so wrong in if I follow a technique. Fiction writing just seems too unstructured for me.

With that knowledge about myself, I figured I would hate and dread this assignment.

But I haven't.

I actually have the highest word count in class at this point, to my knowledge. I'm actually kind of sad I only have half my story left to write because I feel like my characters are nowhere near done. Even after I turn them in for a completion grade, I'll have enough momentum this summer to keep them going and finally finish their story because even after this assignment is turned in, I will still be what I always was: a writer.