Creative Writing College Courses

It’s great to have a specialty, but there’s also value in working outside of your comfort zone.Plus, a staple of intro creative writing classes and fiction workshops will be writing short stories.

That’s like starting in at rock climbing by tackling Mt. Short stories help you learn your craft.”Needing to complete assignments for classes will get you to finish things.

If you prefer novels, taking a creative writing class will have you writing short stories.

If you really want to learn as much as you can, try to set up an appointment with your professor during their office hours to dig even deeper into the course material.

There are always some faculty members who have an overwhelming course load and won’t be quite as friendly about this kind of thing, but I’m actually very fortunate to say that I’ve never run into this problem with creative writing faculty.

Sure, you can also ask Google questions, but you often must comb through the results to make sure the answer you’re getting is truthful and factual.

Independent research is all well and good, I always recommend doing it, but getting some of your questions answered by an experienced person is valuable.At any rate, it’s really easy to strike up conversation with your fellow writers, since you’ve already read their work.Most of the creative writing workshops I’ve been in will have the desks arranged in a circle so that people can make eye contact and see each other during critique.It just wasn’t something that personally interested me.Subsequently, when I did describe things in my writing, I did it at the absolute minimum in the name of keeping my pacing quick and interesting. However, more than a quarter of the people in my class picked up on the fact that I barely described the setting at all.Your situation may not be as extreme as mine was, but it’s still invaluable to get feedback on the things we can improve in our work, both large and small.When tackling the question of if creative writing classes are worth it, Writer’s Cookbook echoes the notion that you can take any level of writing workshop — at a university, a library — will help you get feedback and improve.This turned out to be horrendously problematic because I was writing historical fiction.This was a wakeup call for me that I needed to really work on building the setting in my writing while still finding ways to balance that out with keeping up the story’s pace.You’ll see your fellow students much more than you do in a class with the typical desk orientation that puts all eyes at the front of the room.Sure, when you’re older and working full time, you can afford to go to your nearest city to attend open mic events, networking events, and so on.