Creative Writing

A Brief Reflection on Creative Writing

I'm currently in a History class in which we spend the entire semester researching a specific topic before writing a paper on it. Our first draft is due in less than a week. As is about five other things I need to get done. All these things hit me like a ton of bricks and sent me into a panic attack. I dragged myself out of bed at 3 in the morning because I knew I wasn't getting sleep so long as I was crying, so I might as well distract myself, with either someone streaming or music. No one streaming looked appealing to me in the moment, so I turned on my aptly-named Spotify playlist: "The world around me is collapsing, and I'd like to feel something good again." It mostly consists of Taylor Swift and Lindsey Stirling, with some Twenty-One Pilots and BTS thrown in for good measure. Let me tell you what, that playlist absolutely destroyed my panic attack, hit it out of my court like it was a tennis ball and the playlist was Serena fucking Williams.

But that's not why I'm writing this. No, after I felt my panic attack subsiding, I had a moment of reflection, in which I realized something. Going back to that history class I'm in, one of the things that our professor stressed to us this past week is that she feels we all want to get our subjects right. This was good, obviously, because it meant we were now invested in the paper. However, when staring at my computer screen at 3 in the morning, I realized something. Creative writing isn't like that. Not for the first draft, at least. By the end, you're going to want to get it right, but when you're first doing it, just write the damn thing down. Don't worry about trying to figure out what you're trying to say. Make it a jumbled mess, and it'll either come out beautiful in a way you could never have imagined or planned, or it will come out the jumbled mess you made, and then you can straighten it out later. At least you've got the words on the page, and that's the best starting point of all.