This blog post is wayyyy overdue, and I apologize to anyone who has been keeping up with it. In the last week of August I embarked on my last journey of college: senior year. This fall semester I was enrolled in four classes: Fiction Writing Workshop, Environmental Crisis Narrative (English literature topics course), US-East Relations, and then Independent Writing (a course in which I work 1-on-1 with a professor of my choice). As of now, I am currently withdrawn from the history course (US-East Relations). I had originally taken this class in order to fulfill a liberal arts requirements--we need to have 2 social science credits. Unfortunately, my sophomore year my school decided to make a rule that students cannot receive more than one graduation credit from the same department. Since I had already had another history class count towards social science, this means that I can't take another history class to receive the second social science credit. This was a little frustrating, considering I had tried to get into other classes that would fulfill the social science requirement. As part of the liberal arts, I understand these general education requirements; however, it's really hard on students (like me) who have a late start. Anyway, hopefully I'll get into a class next semester. I'll have to, otherwise I won't graduate. Some people might think that I should just enroll in a random class that would fulfill that requirement and be done with it, but I want to take a class that I'm at least interested in. What's the point in taking a class that you have zero interest in, and/or taking it to just fulfill a requirement? None, in my opinion.
The start to my semester was a little rocky. I got in the passing range of all of my classes on my first assignments, and to make things worse, classes just weren't working out the way I thought they were. But now, things have calmed down a bit, and I've been able to gather my bearings. My Fiction Writing Workshop class was the one that I had the most trouble with. Let me tell you.
My professor for this class is one that I've had before. Last spring, I took his writing class where we explored novellas. I absolutely loved his class, and the fact that he allowed and encouraged me to adapt my screenplay into a novella. It was a great success. In that same year, another book idea came to me in the form of a character. I didn't exactly have a story yet, but I was very intrigued and fascinated by this character. I had talked to the professor about it, and asked if maybe I could use that idea for this class. Back then, he seemed okay with it. Now, he wasn't that enthused. He wanted me to hold back on "world-building" and write a story where I'd create characters that readers would meet and greet, and then say good-bye (not those exact words, but I'm paraphrasing). Anyway, for about 2 weeks I was in a slump--like, a MAJOR slump. I was so upset, frustrated, and angry. I also think I felt a little betrayed and hurt. I didn't know what to write. It was obvious to me that I couldn't write what I wanted to write, and that was a horrible feeling. No writer should ever go through it. Writer's block seemed better than being told that you can't write what you want to write. During that two week period I began to feel distant from writing. Everything I wrote was half-hearted, and quite frankly, I didn't care what I was writing. And because of that, I didn't care what people were going to say. This feeling was familiar, not that I'd experience personally before, but I remember hearing about it on TV. Turns out, it was every animal show that had an animal rejected its young.
When I had that thought I felt a little disgusted with myself--like a little bit of my humanity disappeared. I consider each story I write as an extension of me, as a child of my creation. That revelation, if you will, made me think that I was a bad person. So I wrote a story about that experience. Unfortunately, I think most people saw it as a jab at my professor, which I won't deny; however, he was only the catalyst. The real story was about a writer who was caught between what someone else wanted her to write vs. what she wanted to write, and how it made her feel. This is a conflict that every student faces. Do you do what you want to do, and what you truly are interested in? Or do you just write what the professor wants, to please the professor?
On that note, I'm ending this post. In the next one, I'll talk about how I got my writing mojo back. So it's a happy ending...at least for now.
