I knew coming into the Advance Creative Writing workshop that I wanted to be a
writer, and I leave that workshop realizing that I am a writer. The project I
completed is very close to being ready to send out to publishers,
but that’s not why I know that I’m a writer. I am a writer because I am writing
and finishing what I start. I’m not sure why it took until the end of the class for me to realize that. I may have been too focused on the goal of
completing my degree, but I look back over the past two years, and I have
drafts of short stories, poems, plays, and the beginning of longer works that have
been accumulating the entire time. I stand at the beginning of knowing I am a
writer and at a caesura in my life, doing that reflection.
This was my third writing class at Southern New Hampshire University, so I came
into the class knowing the only process that works for me: I needed to bang
out a draft and then work from there. And then I didn’t do it. I allowed myself
to be bogged down the first couple of drafts, worried that a first draft of a
poem wasn’t good enough. Once I got back on track and returned to what works,
“just finish it, and then fix it later,” I was able to get back into the
groove. I like to write a draft, think about it, go back over it, and try new
things. I also like to layer my drafts, looking at the world in one pass,
looking at characters in another, sentence structure in yet another.
The project was a hybrid of fiction and poetry. One thing that I learned in the class about writing fiction is that I
like fantastical elements, like the Denisovan grandmother speaking across the
ages in my project. I always knew that I liked high fantasy, but this is the
second short story I’ve written in as many years that was set in the present
and had a fantasy element insert itself into the plot. I believe that magic
happens, whether it is science we can’t explain yet, or something else, I don’t
know. However, I won’t be surprised in the future when it shows up again in my
writing, because I think it’s part of the “what if” I like to explore in my
fiction.
I felt that eight weeks was not enough time to do
the project complete justice. A hybrid project was ambitious, but I’m glad I
chose to do one. I think I did what I could have done in eight weeks; I didn’t
work on it every other week when a draft was due, I worked on it every day. Throughout,
I wished I could write more quickly. I hope as I continue to write I’ll speed
up.
I had fun playing with the fiction in this story. I didn’t
know where it was going to go when I started. In fact, I didn’t think it would
go anywhere in the direction it took me, especially fantasy.
I wonder if I sometimes over-think things, though. I
don’t know if anyone reading the story in the workshop recognized the painting
above Ari in the coffee house as a reproduction of Gaugin’s “Where Do We Come
From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” It supported a theme I was exploring in
the piece, but it might have been esoteric.
Another thing I learned is that I have a hard time
writing short stories. I had the same problem in the Fiction Workshop I took a couple
of terms ago that I had in this workshop. My stories end up being the start of a novella or novel rather than fitting into a short story. It’s tempting to
think it’s because I choose complicated topics that can’t be resolved in a short
period of time, but some of it has to simply be practice. Flannery O’Connor
explored what I think were complicated themes, and she wrote brilliant short
stories. It’s simply another area for me to keep exploring until I get it
figured out.
When it comes to poetry, I still feel like a novice.
I gained more experience in the workshop and have started playing with various
techniques. In my project I played around with a couple of forms, some
traditional and some not. I included a haiku and then in a later draft, I took
a page from poet Terrance Hayes. I wrote a “golden shovel” poem based on
“Jamesian” by Thom Gunn, which didn’t work very well and only survived one
draft of my project. I also took Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s famous sonnet
“How Do I Love Thee” and created a sonnet based on the first word of each of
the lines in her sonnet. The twist was that instead of the speaker loving a
person, it was about the speaker loving her work. That’s one I will play with
further because it amused me and I didn’t have time to get it where I really
wanted it. In the immediate future I plan to spend time specifically exploring
scansion and prosody.
In fact, I will keep working on all of the poems in
this project. None of the poems I wrote in this project reflect me as the
speaker; it was fun to play around with that.
I believe that I’ve grown more as a poet in this workshop than I have as
a fiction writer, perhaps because I had so much farther to grow. I’ve read a
lot more fiction than poetry over the years.
In the end, this workshop taught me
that I still love writing both genres, and I plan to continue working in both
of them. I decided to finish my degree in Creative Writing and English because
I completed the draft of a novel during National Novel Writing Month
(NaNoWriMo) 2011 and didn’t know what to do next. Now I do, and I’m anxious to
apply what I’ve learned. I have one more class at Southern New Hampshire
University before graduating, and then there’s no stopping me. I’m a writer. I will
continue writing.
