A lot of people I know who are Creative Writing Majors, including my TA's, and professors always talk about how much they write. They wrote this the other night, and that this morning. Hearing them talk about how often they work always worries me as a writer. It worries me because I don't work like that. I don't just write all the time. I'm not working on anything really. Maybe my stories for class, and sometimes I journal (and I try to write in this blog). But I don't sit around just writing.
I wish I did because hearing them talk about it and realizing I don't do what they do makes me feel like maybe I'm not meant to be a writer. I always sort of knew that, even in declaring my major. I don't expect to behind a laptop in a coffee shop all day long making money. I still don't know what I'm going to do when I graduate. I want to be around literature, and around writers. I know that much.
Sometimes, I say that I have to wait for "inspiration" in order to start working on something. I guess that is true in some ways. Once I got inspiration for a short story in my fiction workshop this past quarter, and I think that story is the best thing I've written to date. I want that to happen again, and I also want to continue editing that story. But am I editing that story? No. I'm watching television, and organizing my apartment. Does that make me a writer? Probably not.
It's too late to change my major, and I don't want to. Maybe I'm not meant to be a writer. Maybe I'm just different than the other writers I know. Maybe watching television, organizing my closet, and scrolling through tumblr is my way of writing. Maybe, I still really don't know.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Monday, October 10, 2011
The Adventures of Huck Finn
As you read and learn you begin to make connections with everyday life and the stories that you take in. Even in lectures and class, making connections with lessons with daily activities is bound to happen. But maybe, in creative writing classes this happens more.
Today, in my survey course on fiction writing my professor went on a rant about how high school English classes over analyze stories for symbols. He claimed that no writer he knows sets out to write a symbol into their novel, and that as a writer this is something we should never do. His rant sent me back to a high school, and a story that my friend told me about her English teacher.
While reading The Adventures of Huck Finn, her teacher said, "They were on a wooden raft. You know what else is made of wood?" After no response, he said, "The cross!" It took everything in my friend not to reply, "The raft was made of wood because rafts are made of wood, not because of Jesus."
Ignoring the religious aspects of this argument, you can see my professor's claim on symbolism coming into light. This rant was something tangible and attainable to me because I experienced this exact over analyzing in my own high school. This memory only seemed more relevant to me when later in the class my professor began to explain how in structuring a novel or short story there can be a disconnect of what the main character knows, versus what the reader knows and he used Huck Finn as his example.
Today, in my survey course on fiction writing my professor went on a rant about how high school English classes over analyze stories for symbols. He claimed that no writer he knows sets out to write a symbol into their novel, and that as a writer this is something we should never do. His rant sent me back to a high school, and a story that my friend told me about her English teacher.
While reading The Adventures of Huck Finn, her teacher said, "They were on a wooden raft. You know what else is made of wood?" After no response, he said, "The cross!" It took everything in my friend not to reply, "The raft was made of wood because rafts are made of wood, not because of Jesus."
Ignoring the religious aspects of this argument, you can see my professor's claim on symbolism coming into light. This rant was something tangible and attainable to me because I experienced this exact over analyzing in my own high school. This memory only seemed more relevant to me when later in the class my professor began to explain how in structuring a novel or short story there can be a disconnect of what the main character knows, versus what the reader knows and he used Huck Finn as his example.
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