The Creative Pursuit

I have now been in my “new” apartment for more than 5 months and still have a few boxes of notebooks and books to unpack. So, yesterday, I unpacked a box that contained an old composition notebook in it from a creative writing class my senior year in high school. Most of it was absurd and hysterical, but a part of me was appalled that my 17-year-old self had better diction than I do now. I don’t care if it sounds like a crutch – majoring in journalism totally destroyed my vocabulary and any creative urges I used to have. Heh. OK, so that is part of it, anyway – the other piece might have something to do with working 2-3 jobs at a time while going to school full time for four years…

So anyway, my point is that I don’t write anything anymore. I still journal about twice a week as I have since elementary school – but I haven’t done any creative writing, really, since high school (definitely not consistently). It is pretty depressing. No poetry, short stories, novel attempts… nothing.

In the spring 2007, I took a creative writing fiction course at OU that I absolutely loved. It was incredibly difficult for me in several ways, namely because I was so out of practice and because, as a writing workshop… it entailed sharing your work and having it ripped apart by a published professor and peers. I took it in my final quarter of college and I wish, now, that I had been able to take it sooner and maybe delved further into it. OK, before I start another tangent, my point: I don’t really write anymore and I really should. Not just regurgitating another's words, rearranging sentences from an interview or a research article… I mean, really write.

So, starting today, I am going to actually try again. Maybe only once a week for an hour, but something. We’ll see how it goes. There was no way I could have made Megs’ suggestion of going for NanoWriMo, but maybe I will at least do something on a quasi-regular basis from December on.