Dear Class
Creative writing for me is the blue, three ring mead folder with five or six loose-leaf sheets of paper clipped to the spine and “Creative Writing Unit” Sharpied in red on the front. It is the malaise that engulfed those months of the third grade, the amazingly discouraging inability to extract anything remotely interesting to write from my temporarily absent brain. It is the incessant attempts to end the story and be done with it all made futile by an unending desire for perfection, to end it just right. It is a slice of my memory from years ago, rarely relived, and one that I most like to forget.
Creative writing is at the same time something completely different, yet equally personal. It is in the books, the words of the authors I admire. It is their deeply moving description of the world sitting two inches in front of me that momentarily puts my heartbeat on hold and obliges me to see sunsets, mountains, my family, friends, and life in radically new, entirely more satisfying ways. It is a novel way to convey a feeling or idea in film or still photography. It is a fresh, complete way to apply my more science oriented studies to the problems they bring me to tackle.
Creative writing for me is mostly fear, but behind this heavier nearly opaque emotion is my love for it and a longing to expose and develop the creative parts in me. So, my soon to be friends, I’m asking you to be patient with me as I take a dive into an arena in which I am neither comfortable nor proficient. Don’t let me back up as I know BG and you all won’t, and give me some inspiration in your words! In thanks, I promise to do the same for you.
Cheers!
Doug Shultz
“Creative writing for me is mostly fear, but behind this heavier nearly opaque emotion is my love for it and a longing to expose and develop…”
Well put. I like this sentence because I can relate to it. In terms of language, the fact that you ascribed opaque to an emotion is a great way to think about fear… Check out the quote I included from Kerouac in my own letter– it seems to be about breaking through our own “opaqueness” as writers.
Inspiration: keep writing. This is a fantastic experience, being able to see honesty instead of facades. We go through so much of life seeing what little people want to show us (often not much at all). It’s a breath of fresh humanity to read these letters. I get to see the truth of what people are thinking and experiencing, and it’s heroin. Keep writing, keep showing people who you are. Even if nobody else is interested, I am.
“Don’t let me back up”–awesome. Your presenting both the absent, vacant feeling associated with the intent to write creatively, and the fresh world discovered by writing, creates an excellent background and indicates that your thought process has the power to be quite objective. I don’t think you’ll be able to back up very far before recognizing what you’re doing, provided that one of us hasn’t already called you out on it
keep going, I think you’ve got plenty of room to run.
“It is in the books, the words of the authors I admire. It is their deeply moving description of the world sitting two inches in front of me that momentarily puts my heartbeat on hold and obliges me to see sunsets, mountains, my family, friends, and life in radically new, entirely more satisfying ways.” I like that idea, of an “obliging” work, something that coaxes you to change–to seeing and experiencing with a different eye in an “active” sense. Powerful writing does that.
John Gardner (“Grendel”) talks about it a bit in his book on writing, where he says that when we write, we are writing “as a dream.” The goal we have in interacting with our reader is to displace them, and to make them feel as though the world we have created is habitable. It’s a lofty goal, especially for us starting out, but I hope we can get there.