Creative Writing II Class

 Love Dr. Seuss!

My Creative Writing Class II class has been a blast to take.  I not only enjoyed the class, but I also enjoyed the people in the class.  I have been in writing classes before, but I found this class to be the most constructive and gratifying writing class I have had.

I was able to get to know everyone in the class, and everyone had a wide range of opinions and tastes.  Everyone worked hard and gave good constructive critiques of not just my work, but of their peers.

We did two critiques almost every week and would read ten to thirty pages for each critique and had to write 500 pages.  Being the long winded person I am, I almost always went past that.  I like the formula that we had to do our critiques in.  We started with something positive.  Things we liked about the story.  If we had a problem with the piece, we had to suggest ways to fix the problem.  Then we would talk about pacing, structure, the point-of-view, the target audience, who the piece would alienate, and so on.  When I critique people's work in the future, I plan on using this formula.

In class, we had to publicly tell our opinion of the piece we were critiquing.  Yes, I was nervous at first, but we did not have to stand in front of the class to do this.  And once you have done this a few times, it got a lot easier.

And no one in our class was ever like:

Love you, Mr. Ramsay, but I would never want to work for you
or get a critique from you!  I'm a wuss like that!

Everyone stayed respectful and professional.  You know it is a good class when people are giving their opinions littered with humor and people are laughing.  I always find laughter to be a good sign.

Even though most of the class was taken up by critiques and submitting our own work -everyone had to submit at least ten pages of different work twice- we also talked about platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs, to get your work out there.

We also talked about the movement of Booktubing and Booktubers.  One of our classes, we all did our own Booktube viedo.  I did the Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.  I said "heart-wrenching" a lot and I do mean a lot, but I love that book.

We also had a guest speaker, Ed Schubert, who talked about everything from e-publishing, editing to the writing process.  He is currently the editor of Orson Scott Card's online literary magazine *Intergalactic Medicine Show.*  We also had our teacher, Ms. Golda Fried, talk about her own writing experience and how it was like her to get published.  She has written a novel and a book of short stories called Nellcott Is My Darling novel and Darkness Then a Blown Kiss stories.

We also talked about having other people talk about and plug your works.  :D 

We also had to create our own blog, and well, blogged.  We have had a lot of chances to write in class of not just our own work and our critiques of others, but with blogging.  We also had to edit our work from the critiques and write a sample query letter.

Thumbs up with all the practice with writing we had to do.

I will try to keep writing on my blog because it is good practice with writing.  I just have to think of topics that I can write on.

So, overall I enjoyed the class and everyone in it!  I will miss you all!

Now to answer Ms. Fried's questions of my plans for my writing future:

I wish I could have written more during class, but I always wished I could have.  I believe my writing output will be much better with not having to write papers for other classes.  I plan on continuing writing in the future.  I want to continue to practice writing even if its not for a book or for a short story.  I would like to finish writing my book, Harper's Winter Vacation.  If I do finish writing my book, I would send out query letters to agents.  It was not hard to find agents and publishers out there, especially ones that I liked.  The true question is whether I will be picked up or not.  If I do not get any bites, I plan on epublishing my work, like maybe on Create Space.