I had no choice but to sign up for a Creative Writing class this semester - a class I've been avoiding for awhile now.
Here's the truth - I am really insecure about sharing my writing. This blogging thing is really funny because I find that I am almost always inclined to share a real personal side of me, when in reality I am uninterested in letting most people get to know me.
So this creative writing class brings about some anxiety, because we are openly sharing our work. And I can take criticism, but there was an incident in a Lit class last year where we were paired up with a classmate to proofread one another's papers, and I was paired with this girl who was terrible at following the college paper format, or writing in general. I went easy on her though, because she had openly admitted to me that she hated writing and was only taking the class to fulfill her degree requirements.
When I got my paper back it was like somebody had violently attacked it with a red ballpoint pen. I stared at the paper I'd spent hours working on and researching, butchered. All the sentences she'd disregarded with a flippant slash, and scribbles of "this doesn't make sense" or "please revise" or "where is the thesis statement?" all over the margins. I was a bit miffed. The thesis statement is in the last line of the first paragraph, shit-for-brains, I wanted to say.
Her paper on the other hand was so unfortunate that no amount of editing could have saved it, and I might as well have just ran one long diagonal slash through the entire thing and written, "please take College Writing 101 again."
But I didn't.
But what would be worse is being the worst in a class of confident wordsmiths and storytellers.
The professor had us do some writing exercises before anything else.
Off to a bad start.
