Today I had to do two prompts for my creative writing course. The first prompt was to describe a "black sheep" of the family and write about why they were considered to be odd and why you might have liked or admired them. The second was to describe someone's room using descriptions for all five senses, and then reveal a secret at the end.
The reason I am putting this in my blog is to reveal something I have learned about writing; you don't always like what you have to write.
I hated these assignments. They weren't me! But I also realize that if a person wants to earn money as a writer, they may have to take freelance assignments where he has to write about a subject that doesn't interest him. These qualified, that's for sure. But in writing these stories, I began to understand that I have to take even more care when writing in cases like this. One student who reviewed my paper said that he could tell that this subject was less appealing to me than previous papers. He could tell! Even though I thought the work was pretty good, this student - who doesn't know me at all - could tell that I wasn't thrilled with the assignment!
Thus, the lesson for myself today is to make myself interested in what I have to write. If I can't get interested in my mind, it won't be interesting on paper.
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Actually I think that first one is AWESOME, but perhaps that's because I am from, well, MY family. Anyway, I've had to write about many things I didn't want to. My secret? Find a way to twist it into something else. The trap is, when you don't like something, you tend to stick to closely to the guidelines, whereas you have more freedom with something you do enjoy, as you are more open to it. For example, when my teacher told us to write a paper explaining the meaning of Art, I wrote a long paper on "L'arte de critiquing arte". When I was done, I read it over, emailed it to my teacher, and scrapped it. I wrote a second essay in about 20 minutes (as opposed to the first one which took hours), which was a tongue-in-cheek discourse on the art of writing essays in which I quoted from myself. It was basically a big joke that didn't follow the guidelines, but I recieved 100% for the creativity. The point is, if you don't like the prompt...change it! (secretly, and unless it is an actual essay). Otherwise, you'll have teenagers writing blog-long comments on your blog.
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