When I was working on my bachelor’s degree, I was a creative writing emphasis in the English program. There were several types of writing that each writer had to study. It didn’t matter what you loved. You still had to study poetry, and creative non-fiction, and good old prose. Everyone in the program was going to write or had already written a novel. Everyone in the program loved to read and had strong opinions about old works. Life is busy, but writing is important.
Types of Writing
Creative Non-Fiction
Then, a lot of writers were seduced by other types of writing. This is why everyone has to take classes about different kinds of writing. Several people decided that they loved creative non-fiction. Think of a memoir, a memoir is written about a time in your own life while you are still living it. A person can jump around in time. One of the most popular memoirs, and the first, is IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote. This book is classified as creative non-fiction because sections of the book are written from the point of view of the killers. The story is true. It’s not fiction, Capote went to the jail and interviewed them to get the facts, and then he wrote the book as if he were them. Another example is Joan Didion, who was a famous creative non-fiction writer. All of her work is very moving. The point that a lot of students made is that pulling their inspiration from their life directly, instead of thinking about how to fictionalize it or hide it, made the idea of writing less stressful. When it comes to non-fiction, as long as you put “creative” in front of it, it can be okay. However, when you are using real facts, you need to make sure that you are accurate.
Poetry
Poetry got some students, but not as many as creative non-fiction. My poetry teacher loved my work. Poetry can be really satisfying because you can revise a poem 12 times and have a finished work in a day. You can write one word over and over again, and that can be a poem. Most of us learn about basic rhyme schemes in elementary school, but there are so many more. You can write a poem using first letter rhyming, or one where every word has the same middle letter. You can write a prose poem or an epic poem. It can mean nothing. It can mean everything. Poetry is very flexible that way. My teacher for this class used her own writing as an example.
Prose
Let’s talk about the kind of writing that most people go to college for. Prose. That “great American (or whatever country you’re in) Novel.” The first thing that they make you do, the first major class in the program, is literary analysis. I think that some people may get discouraged at this point. Some people get very excited here; they are learning to read closely and dive deep into a book. There are students who love to look for that second layer of meaning hidden beneath the words. Obviously, starting here is important because in order to understand the difference between a good book that has a formulaic plot and a one-dimensional character and a great book that shines in every way, one must study them. Personally, I learned so much about plotting by reading. I learned so much about what great writing looks like by studying it. Some of the first books we studied in that literary analysis class were THE GREAT GATSBY, THE TEMPEST, and several works of Edgar Allen Poe.
Anyway, any writing requires a degree of understanding what good writing looks like. But the biggest thing to understand is that editing/revision is what makes writing work. The first thing you put down, I always talk about it as the story I’m telling to myself. It may or may not make it into the final draft. But you don’t have anything to edit if you don’t write it first.
Life is busy, but writing is important.
