I was a Creative Writing Minor...but I didn't Learn Craft

I love telling people that I was an English major in college. It feels like a badge of honor when I tell someone that I spent four years diving into literature and writing papers. I studied the Classics, I read the great poets, and I wrote deep examinations of Poe’s use of the faceless narrator and how Jane Austen created male characters that were poor examples of masculinity. 

I’m also proud to say that creative writing was my minor. I wanted to learn how to create great stories and write excellent prose. I wanted my words to enrapture audiences. I wanted to be a Hemingway or Tolkien. In all respects, I still do.

However, as I’m halfway through the editing process of my first book, I have discovered something: there is a menagerie of things about creative writing that I don’t know. Verily, there are a lot of things that my professors did not teach me about the craft of writing.

While in college, my fiction writing classes were set up a lot like this: a room full of 20-something-year-olds who wanted to write the next Harry Potter, the next A Time to Kill, the next mega-bestseller. Our professor would sit in front of the class, a number of published works under his belt, guiding us on our journey. He would assign readings from Hemingway’s In Our Time, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, or stories from his own book. We would read the stories and discuss them in class. My professor would point out these mystical nuances in the authors’ writings that made the stories function as great examples of fiction. From there on, we would be assigned to write our own stories and read them to the rest of the class to have them critiqued. These were my creative writing and workshop classes in a nutshell. 

I found these classes enlightening, and I enjoyed the readings, and I enjoyed writing the stories. However, it has been five years since I graduated with my degree and with my minor in creative writing, and I’m just realizing how little of the craft I learned. My professor never talked about action beats, the driving motivation of a character, or the art of revision. So many things an author of fiction needs to know, and I wasn’t taught much of it. I’m learning these things on my own now through reading books on the writing craft and talking with editors as more of my fiction is published 

The emphasis in my writing classes was on getting stuff written, and I think that’s great. However, writing something down will only take you so far. You have to take the mess you dump on the page and make it into something that is worthwhile to read. And to do that, you need to know your craft. 

Do I regret studying creative writing? Of course not. It had a positive impact on my writing journey. I just wish that I realized the importance of craft earlier on and that I had begun studying it sooner. My creative writing courses in college didn’t do that, and now I have to make up for lost time. However, it does prove one thing about writing: you never stop learning it. 

 

(This article was originally published in The People-Sentinel). 

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