Creative Writing: Introduction

I’ve recently started taking an introductory creative writing course through the School of Continuing Studies at U of T. I’m a couple of sessions in, with eight more to go, and so far I’ve found it really enlightening.

The five hundred words I posted earlier this afternoon were actually my take on our first assignment. I handed it in at the end of our second class, and it’ll be workshopped during the third, along with all the others. And based on what we learned last week, I can already quantify a bunch of ways in which it kind of sucks and could be drastically improved.

It’s definitely too plain. It reads like a list of bullet points, blandly descriptive and hardly very evocative. There’s not as much sense of character as their could be. Whatever conflict drives the story is only suggested. And in spite of all that, it still reads as cute and clichéd in its sappier moments.

You’ve got to start somewhere, right? If all goes well, Wednesday’s session should heap a lot more constructive criticism on top of the pile above. And to be honest, that’s kind of exciting.

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