My GWW creative writing 101 is on the home stretch and will soon approach the finish line. I’ve submitted my last assignment for peer feedback — not without heart palpitations and butterflies launching attacks on my stomach. A couple of good comments from my classmates assuaged my anxiety, but I wasn’t as lucky as some other students who received a “whopping” number of comments – three! (Peer feedback was something I’d really missed in this class.) After the instructor provides his comments on our stories, the course is officially over.
Usually when a course ends, I feel proud that I’ve made it that far and accomplished something worthwhile along the way, but this always comes with an immense sense of relief: pressure’s off, no more poring over textbooks, no more burning midnight oil, trying to get things done by a looming deadline, or at least not until I decide I really need to take some other course. In that sense, CW101 is a refreshing change — I just don’t want the course to end! At the beginning of it, I was enthusiastic, yet dubious about my ability to write a single sentence that could remotely qualify as creative. And despite my misgivings, I fell in love with fiction writing. I am still unsure whether the love is reciprocal. Will I ever be?
So, what’s next on the horizon? GWW offers an online fiction course that spans 10 weeks (with CW101 it was only six), which I will likely take with the same instructor, Chip Livingston, who’s been very supportive and responsive and provided really good feedback (in a sense that his feedback was constructive and helpful.) But that’s almost a month away. Meanwhile, I’d like to go through the CW101 lectures and do some of the suggested exercises that I didn’t have the time to complete during the course, and – fingers crossed – I’ll have enough time and motivation to keep writing.
All in all it was a great course, well worth money, time and effort spent, with a lot of useful tips and inspiration.
Six most important lessons learned:
- Treat writing like a job: show up (preferably every day), write on schedule and toward a goal (word count is a good place to start)
- Read and learn (any piece of writing, good or bad, can teach something, but good literature is the best source of learning)
- Keep your eyes, ears and mind open to new experiences and ideas
- Assume that the first draft is never good enough – write and re-write, then edit more
- Make it a goal not to be good, but to get better, draft by draft, piece by piece
- As with any creative pursuit, have fun!
Related articles
- Creative Writing 101 (macrospectra.com)
- Wednesday Workshop! (idhbic.com)
- Creative writing in 25 words or less (write21.wordpress.com)
- Adventures in Creative Writing (reflectionsinapuddle.wordpress.com)
- Beginner’s Guide to Taming Writer’s Block (reflectionsinapuddle.wordpress.com)
Some useful lessons here, which make me feel very guilty, as recently I have been failing at lesson number 1 (I’ve been cheating on my writing by spending more time with my photography).
Even though the course has finished I hope you will still be blogging – I’ve enjoyed your posts. And good luck with the next course, if you decide to do it x
I wish I could do more photography! It’s just not enough time for everything I wish I could be doing 🙂 Thank you for reading and your kind & encouraging words. I really appreciate it!
Loved the GWW “Writing Fiction” book ! 🙂
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