As a brief side-note before the reflection essay itself, I just want to say that originally there was not going to be a song video attached. Then I heard this song on the radio, realized it's a song that I've had bits and pieces of stuck in my head for years, and promptly became obsessed with. Anyway, here's my reflection essay.
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This Creative Writing class is probably the hardest English class I've ever taken; and I like writing-for the most part, anyway. I like to think that I've come a long way from the girl in first grade who though that writer's block was a permanent condition (do not tell a child who takes everything literally that they have writer's block and then not explain that it doesn't last forever). The majority of my stories do still feature cats, however (I have six fanfictions for the Warriors series by Erin Hunter. Six), and I still struggle to add the proper amount of description. But I learned a lot in this class, even if I hated it at times.
One thing in learned in this class that I'm definitely going to remember is to always have something with me to jot down story ideas as they come to me, no matter where I am; I've actually been telling that to my followers lately on Tumblr when they come to me with writing questions. I prefer to have an electronic copy of whatever it is that I'm currently writing, and a physical copy, so I tend to write down my ideas on my NOOK or my phone first, then on paper. I remember a few days near the end of my sophomore year, I spent almost all of my first block English 2 class working on one of my stories on my iPod touch. I hadn't written anything for it in a while, and I finally had a breakthrough; I think I wrote two or three chapters. And then I accidentally deleted one of them. It took me three weeks to rewrite that one chapter.
Another thing I learned is that not all poetry is evil. Would it surprise you to know that before the poetry unit, I absolutely hated writing poetry? Between the syllable count and making sure the right lines rhymed, I could not write poetry to save my life. Then we learned about villanelles and I finally found a type of poem I could write without wanting to break my pencil. These all took me between twenty and forty minutes each to write, actually. In seventh grade, it took me something closer to an hour to write a haiku. The moral of this story is that haikus are evil and villanelles are wonderful, wonderful things.
I also learned that I can turn absolutely anything into fanfiction if I try hard enough. Remember the writing prompt from the first day, "I reached over and gouged out his left eye"? Yeah, well, that happened to be the day after the title for the fourth Throne of Glass book, Queen of Shadows, was released. The author, Sarah J. Maas, had mentioned that the title had something to do with the character Manon Blackbeak (whom I adore), and in the chapter she's introduced in from Heir of Fire she kills three men, so my imagination just sort of ran with that. Probably half of the writing prompts I wrote were either a continuation of that prompt, or of another that was also Throne of Glass fanfiction. Neither of them actually ended up going anywhere; I will freely admit I have a serious issue with my stories lacking a solid plot. But I'm working on that with my two fanfictions for The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Clare (I'm actually plotting them out first).
Overall, I feel that this Creative Writing class has definitely helped me to grow as a writer. I actually know how to write poetry now. I learned more about the difference between too little description in a story (aka all of mine) and too much, as well as about the different types of point of view (I prefer first-person). And I can finally appreciate just how much work a published author has to put into getting published in the first place. This class may have been a living hell for me at times, but I think it was definitely worth it in the long run.
