Introduction

Hello everyone! This is my introduction thread. I’d like to know about:
You
Your style of writing
Why you signed up for this class (so I can help you achieve any goals you want out of this)

I’m currently a freshman at Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester, Massachusetts. I’ve co-taught creative writing classes with a former professor quite a few times. This past year, I branched out and taught a few of my own (all of them were free, on my own time, at a few local low-income high schools) and I began a writers circle with a few people in the area. We meet up at local cafés a few times a month to coach each other along and share our current pieces.

My style of teaching:

DON’T CONSIDER ME AN ‘INSTRUCTOR’! WE ARE ALL IN THIS CLASS. I AM JUST SHARING THE IDEAS FOR IT. Consider me to be the coordinator of a project you are working on by completing this class.
I’m not going to FORCE you to turn things in. All of the topics that I give are due in 2 weeks from the date given. The only reason I ask for due dates is so we can all share our pieces. I will be doing them with you and sharing them, also. You don't have to post them if you don't feel comfortable with your work, but I urge you to post so we can see your talent. I want constructive criticism, NO BAD MOUTHING OTHERS WORK!

I am here to help you individually, also. If you need help/ideas, please message me. I want us all to be able to help each other. If there is something you’d like to incorporate into the class, also, please let me know and I will introduce it to the class. If you find you are having a problem with the class/me/another student, please message me.

I will post about six lessons a week (this doesn't mean you have to participate 6 out of 7 days a week. They will be posted at random every week and if you prefer, you can just read them all at once and go from there). Every other week's lessons will include most of the writing topics. I want you to learn from this and not just write what I throw in front of you. I do not want you to just write something to write it for this class, I want you to learn something from it which is why on the weeks there aren't a lot of exercises, I will be posting informational lessons-more like lectures online, I guess. I want to give you that off-week to absorb what you see and use it in your writing for the due dates. Plus, it is kind of difficult for us to read and critique someone else’s work and try and write our own at the same time, so the weeks that there is more reading than writing, we can focus on submitting our work and viewing others.

If this were an actual college course that needed text books, I would recommend three books as text books. I will be getting all of my lessons from these books.

A Writer’s Book of Days - Judy Reeves
The Playful Way to Serious Writing - Roberta Allen
Writing Toward Home (Tales and Lessons to Find Your Way) - Georgia Heard

I am currently creating an entire list of topics (approximately 400-500). Some of them are from A Writer’s Book of Days. Judy Reeves offers a topic for each day of the year. I will post those topics for your personal use, not necessarily for the class unless you want to share something that you wrote from one of the topics.

I want this class to be motivational. I am using a 10 week syllabus that can be used and reused for anyone interested in signing up later on.

This class is aimed towards motivating you to write and creating great friendships among writers.

Happy Writing!
Malia

 

This sounds like a great class... so this is where you sign up, right? Should I answer the first three questions?

 

I am really looking forward to this class, especially since your reference books are ones I have never read. I teach creative writing though I consider myself less a teacher and more a facilitator, and it is exciting to be exposed to new teaching and learning techniques. It is also great to be in a group of like minded people.

I am 3 months shy of my 41st birthday, and I have a BA in English. I am currently working on my portfolio to submit to low residency MFA programs in writing. I have to go for the low residency programs because I own a house that comes complete with a huge garden, 7 cats, 2 dogs, and an elderly mother for whom I care. With the housing market so terrible and the market for elderly mothers all but nonexistent, I am stuck where I am, so low residency is the only option for me.

I work at a residential agency for children who are wards of the state. Most have been taken away from their families due to neglect or abuse and the majority are "emotionally disturbed," though I find that to be a rather vague term. I've been there for over 6 years, and while the bs inherent in working for any organization is a pain, I am devoted to my charges.

I suffer from severe major depression that hits me like an anvil and makes it hard to get out of bed. Weekly assignments that encourage me to use my creativity will be just the thing. I guess that's about it for now. We'll no doubt see one another both here and in other forums we visit in common.

Sincerely,



LL :sunny:

 

Actually, I think I have used A Writer's Book of Days. It is a collection of fairly neutral yet nonetheless intriguing writing prompts broken down by month and day ... some of my best stories have been launced from those prompts

 

Well, I'm 17 and a senior in high school. I really want to get into songwriting/poetry, but I everytime I pick up a pen to write, I get scared that nothing I write will ever compare to those writers I look up to. My style of writing tends to vary depending on my mood, but a lot of times it's a bit cryptic and playful, sometimes serious and meaningful, and sometimes it's just shit. I guess I'm taking this class mainly to give me an excuse to write, partly to give me practice, somewhat for ideas, and a wee tad for feedback. I just really want to write without thinking, "Gosh, this really blows compared to..." I want to be able to go, "Yeah, this makes me feel good as a writer/songwriter/poet."

One question: Creative writing, does that include poetry?

Thank you so much for teaching this class! I really really appreciate it.

 

LostLass-I'm glad you are excited. Writing has helped many people through depression-myself included. I love picking up a pen and sharing and receiving ideas about my writing/others writing and it makes the world of difference. I hope I can help you tap into that creativity!

Divinaeon-I don't really "teach" about poetry but if you feel better to write poetry instead of a short story/paragraph/whatever, be my guest! This is to help YOU open up to YOURSELF and find that creative muse hidden within.

I don't want anyone to consider their writing to be "shit." Sometimes it's just better and flows easier than other times. I think you'll really like the timed lessons when I get to them, Divinaeon

 

Me? erm... Im 14. I like me. Erm... yeah...

My style of writing... It varies. I wrote some comedy script stuff with my bro and everyone we showed it to found it hilarious. I think my writing isnt very good but its like average... If you know what i mean (thats when i write normally) i have a good imagination but it doesnt always make sense. I think when i write like a weirdo it comes out better... But i dont write like that much. This probably wont mae much sense but oh well.
I want to be better on my own - i can do all the funny comments which add to the story and good ideas etc to make it better but i really suck when it comes to the storyline and that sorta stuff (thats where my bro came in)

Basically i wanna be able to write something good on my own... After a while i can never think of whats gonna happen next. What could happen next.


Oh yeah and im FAR too dramatic... Seriously i mean drama rocks an all but i sorta dont in these things..

 

Isn't it a requirement that 14 year old young women be way too dramatic? Time will no doubt temper those tendencies

 

haha it probably will...

 

Alright well....I'm 15 and I love to write, so of course when I saw a creative writing class I had to see what it was all about. As for my style...I don't really know how I'd explain it. Here is an excerpt from a short story I wrote a few months ago, hopefully that will help.

Billy

When I first met Billy, I didn’t know what to think of him. He was different, that was for sure. Billy didn’t really care what was cool or what everyone else was doing. For Billy, the time and the place didn’t matter, it was the person that mattered. I admired his individuality. It put him up on a pedestal in my eyes. We were about 9 when we met. We still had that childhood innocence, when life wasn’t such a challenge. When we were 12, Billy’s father died. It was a sad time, a time of morbid depression. But we made it through. And the last of our childhood innocence died with that year.
There was this forest behind Billy’s house that we first ventured into a few days after meeting. A year after that, we constructed a bench in a little clearing about a mile into the woods. It was what you’d expect from 10 year olds. Nothing elaborate, nothing fancy. But we were damn proud of it. Like a beaver admiring his newly built dam, we stared at it for a good 5 minutes. Than we sat on it and we talked about what was important to us at the time; what level is your new pokemon on, did you try that new flavor of warheads (do you remember those sour little beauties?), stupid trivial things like that which, at the time, meant the world to us. A few years later, when we were both 15, we still came to that bench to talk about the important matters of life. The nails were rusted and splinters were inevitable but it was tradition.

Those are just the first two paragraphs...but I hope it helped.
EDIT: and sorry about the paragraphs not being indented....I dunno why it did that

 

Hi, I'm Aidan. I'm 33, live in Thailand, and teach English as a second language. I have been writing sporadically for years. Lately, I have been able to put aside some time to write and have been concentrating mainly on poetry/storytelling. I have never been to any writing class, creative or otherwise, and am very interested and excited to be trying this out.

 

I'm Sandy. I'm a 24-year-old, happily married, mother of four beautiful, well-behaved children I couldn't be more proud of. I have been reading, writing, and drawing for as long as I can remember (I was two, at oldest, when I began any of the three). I am pretty picky about spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc, but I know I don't always speak or write in perfect English so I at least am not too judgmental. It does tell me a lot about a person if they refuse to even try, though, and I will point out errors if they are really important. I've been through a lot of difficult times in my few years as an adult, and went through a few difficult times as a young child and teenager, so my writing is usually a reflection of that. As a child, I wrote a lot of fictional stories where the characters were animals with human traits, living human lifestyles. The first story I really remember writing was in kindergarten. It was based on a visit I had with my grandmother, who had a lot of cats. I loved cats, and was always excited to visit her. I also loved kangaroos, and that was what my main character was-- a baby kangaroo. Her parents asked her if she would like to go visit her grandmother, who had cats, and she was excited about it. I don't remember a lot about the story, but I remember the last sentence: The baby kangaroo said, "Hay! I would like that! I like cats." Funny thing about it was, at five years old, the only word I misspelled in the entire story was "hey."
Then as I matured and could think of a bigger variety of subjects to write about, I started writing about things I wanted. I still wrote a lot of fiction, but a lot of my stories were based partially on my life and partially on what I wanted out of life. I wrote about loneliness more and more as I got older, first writing about the desire for more friends, but as I became more and more interested in guys, I wrote stories about teen love. The stories always ended with the main character (representing me) finally meeting a new friend or getting a boyfriend. I also wrote poetry as a teenager, mostly about love but one or two were deep poems about death, depression, and suicide. No, I never contemplated suicide seriously enough to write poetry about it, much less actually attempt it, but I did have an uncle who committed suicide and was led to believe that my mother hated him and was glad he was dead, and I wrote a poem about that. It was the first time one of my teachers complimented me on my writing. Then in high school we were supposed to write a story that would be similar to the tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and my English teacher loved mine. I became more and more interested in writing short stories and poetry, but am now working on a novel about a family that is split up due to domestic violence, spousal abuse, child abuse, and the state child protective agency. So far I am fairly satisfied with that, but it is only in its first stages; I'm not even finished with the first chapter. I'm not even sure how long a chapter should be. I would like to write a long enough novel that it would be able to be converted into at least a two-hour movie, but I may just make it a short novel. Screenplay writers are pretty good at adding detail to novels and short stories to make great movies that are based on them. I've also come up with a few more ideas for novels, and will one day get all my poetry collected into one book and publish it.
I'm also an artist and hoping to start selling my work soon.
Did I answer all three questions? Probably not, I ramble a lot. But, I'll finish introducing myself eventually. I'm complex and difficult to get to know, so it may take a long time to do that.

 

I'm pushing 70. I discoverd something strange about my brain a long time ago.
When I'm at that aquescent state, between sleep and consiousness, stories go zinging through my head at high speed.
Sometimes I can remember parts of them.
Usually I lose most of the stories because I cant type fast enough to get them down before the Memory goes on to something else.

I thought I'd learn to write short stories for my Grandchildren. Stories that would include bright colored pictures to help them learn to read for pleasure.

Adventure stories for young boys. Hunting, survival, and dangerous animal encounters for those Teenagers who might be poverty stricken enough to need books instead of the Black berry.

Absolutly nothing involving the super-natural.
Nothing I write is going to be Politically Correct. I like things to be factual. The way they really are.

So does this sign me up? Do I have to go to another page to sign up?
What?

 

Steve here, soon to be 62. Life has been interesting most of the time and when it hasn't been I've usually been able to stir it up. People fasinate me, their stories untold behind masks of the ordinary. I've worked as a therapist in a state mental hospital for too many years, all the while adopting and raising 7 boys as a single parent. My youngest is now 14, a freshman in high school, trying to make sense of the world in a language he was not born to. He and his older brother were born and raised along the banks of the Amazon River in Peru. I fled to the Amazon many years ago on sabatical from the hospital. That place, the most biodiverse spot on Earth, was the ultimate metaphor of the meaning of life. The Jungle, the River that cuts through it and the enactment of lives that take place there have fasinated me since childhood and long winter days pouring through musty National Geographics. I find it hard to self disipline, to force myself into the story, yet the story is always there for me. Different chapters and verses all run through my brain as willy-nilly crazy as the herd of young Heathens I've had the joy of fathering.
Always it's said that the first stories must come from where you are, who you are and so many of things I'll write about will be the symphonic chaos of life, the Jungle itself. The purpose of the story is simply the story itself, that it appears somewhere in a medium outside of my skull. I could simply put it on paper in the quiet of my home and later use it to start the wood stove fire. But I wouldn't do that, write that is, I'm too lazy. The pressure of sticking myself on stage a bit, though, may bring the story out...or so I tell myself. Regardless, Thank You, and thank you other writers too...Lets tell each other things!

 

OK, so it looks like I'm not bright enough to post stuff here. I tried to post a piece of material but I can't see that it turned up anywhere. Anybody got any thoughts/suggestions as to where I went wrong?

 

Did you post it as a reply to an exercise? That may be why.

 

Should I be posting stuff as a reply to an exercise? I don't really know exactly where I should post it? It will be my first post here since I am now (alledgedly) signed up. It's a couple of paragraphs of a story, is that the wrong thing to be posting at this point. I don't see any other examples to go by. I'm sorry if I seem difficult, I'm just not sure where it should be posted.

 

No, it's fine. If you read my introduction at the beginning of this thread, you'll get a feel for the class and the syllabus is a separate thread so you know what we're covering. The lessons are also posted from week 1-now which is week 4. So you get all of the exercises, etc. there. I think I had a free write thread where you could post anything if you want to try that.

 

Can't find the free write thread or perhaps I'm too ate up to recognize it. I responded to a couple of the lessons by adding them on to the end of your original posts. If thats not OK just show me where you want them. Wish I could see what other folks are writing. This is starting to feel good, an old hunger finally finding a morsel to gnaw on. Thanks

 

Hi there,Im taw,I live in Mexico City and Im 14 years old.My writing style is to not have a writing style,I just write about anything,songs,short stories,film scripts,poems etc what matters to me is pouring my head,heart and soul on a piece of paper.Im here to learn more about the thing that passionates me and to meet people who share the same interest as me.