SELF-REFLECTIVE PROCESS ESSAY

Creative writing was a distant childhood dream for me, which I had gradually given up on over the years. Taking up this paper was a gamble, after a lifetime of comfortable academic decisions. And the first few weeks were all my worst fears come true. The amount of socializing that the class demanded was absolutely shocking for me. I liked how interactive the class was, but I felt like the class put too much emphasis on sharing what you write, and doing it right in the moment. I understood that assessing creativity is impossible without actually sharing it, and putting up these blog posts will go down in history as the moment when I overcame my lifelong fear of showing people what I write, and being too worried of their judgement. But I still could not garner up the courage to meet sir for the feedback on my work. That is still work in progress.

One thing that I can say without a shadow of a doubt is that this course has definitely changed the way I think about poetry. Before, my idea of poetry was pretty much cognizant to it being the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. That it could be broken down into so many craft elements, was pretty much unimaginable for me. And watching all of it being unraveled in class was an experience that I am going to cherish for the rest of my life. The six horrible poems that I submitted for the previous assignment were the first poems that I have ever written in my twenty-two years of existence. And even though my faith in my lack of poetic flair seemed to have been renewed, I am glad I went with it anyway. The biggest discovery for me was thus the fact that I could write at all.

However, I personally feel that we spent too much time on poetry. One of the reasons I had taken up this course was because of the inclusion of “The God of Small Things” in the syllabus, and I feel like not enough justice was done to it. The craft elements of writing long fiction were not dealt with for as long as I would have liked.

My creative process for most of my work begins with something inspiring around me. In a way, it has to appeal to my senses. Another source is memory. The short story that I have written for the end term is highly inspired by personal experiences, modified for artistic purposes.  Now I have noticed that I consciously try to unravel the creative potential of events as they unfold, which means that I am forever on the lookout for things that I think are worthy of being put down in words.

This course has forced me to reconsider myself as a creative writer, and seems to have honed the skills that I already sort of had. I am going to come out of this more confident of showing people my work.