Should You Take A Creative Writing Course

I took one so you don’t have to

Creative writing is something that many people, especially on this platform, have always been interested in. For me, I have always connected to creating stories and reading others' stories in search of inspiration and sometimes an escape from reality.

But, creative writing, in general, is often subjective. One person’s writing style is almost always different from another which makes many people skeptical of the idea of enrolling in a creative writing course. For me, I thought that it would make my writing too structured to the point where it would affect the way I tell a story. But I could not have been more wrong.

This was what I worried about going into the first day of my course. I did not want to go into a class and learn about how a story needs to have an exposition, middle, climax, and resolution. Although these may be good things to know when creating your story, I wanted to be inspired and collaborate with others around me.

What I didn’t realize was that many creative writing courses operate as a workshop. This means that many days you are given a prompt of some sort, then you write, and then you will read your work to the class and people will help you dissect what could be improved, and compliment what they liked. I really enjoyed this because it was rewarding to hear other people’s stories, while also gaining constructive criticisms on how to improve.

The beautiful thing about creative writing courses is that the people who are there want to be there. It is not some calculus class that most people are just being forced to take for various reasons. (No offense if you enjoy calculus)

Sharing your writing with the people around you can be insanely scary and anxiety-inducing, but I found that majority of the people in a creative writing course feel the same way, and want to help you feel comfortable too.

Something that I was pleasantly surprised by was the connection that the group made when somebody shared something like a poem about a very sensitive topic or event that happened in their life, or when somebody read the first chapter of a memoir they had been…

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