creative writing class

Jill invited those of us who live near her to a creative writing class (an Enrichment midweek activity) last night. She insisted that it didn't matter if I came late after cub scouts, so I did, and I am so glad I made it. (It ended up being Jill, Lori, Hannah, and me, in addition to some of the women from Jill's ward.)

It was taught by a woman who teaches at BYU and she was very personable and funny. I'm not sure what I missed during the first 20 minutes, but after I got there she was talking about writing personal histories. I am very drawn to the idea of personal histories, mostly because I don't have much desire to do family history, but writing about my own life -- that seems doable. I keep trying to get my grandma (I like to call her Charlotte the Great) to write her personal history -- it would be an invaluable treasure to me -- so I suppose I should take my own advice and get working on my own. Our teacher did a good job of taking the enormity out of the task by telling us that a personal history should be a collection of personal essays, with each essay being a personal exploration.

So really, a personal history can be broken down into any number of smaller chunks. Any time I have the time or inclination, I can sit down and work on a piece of writing that has as its goal a little bit of self-discovery. When you put it that way, it doesn't sound so overwhelming or difficult, in fact it sounds pretty fun! So not only will I be learning more about myself in the process, but I will be leaving something that shows the real me for my children and grandchildren to read? Sign me up!

Here are the guidelines we got for making our writing more memorable:

• be honest (more difficult that you might think)
• show, don't tell
• keep it small -- isolate one experience
• **make the ordinary extraordinary**

We did some quick writing exercises and I found that showing rather than telling is very difficult! Even when I was concentrating on showing as my goal, it still sounded like telling when I read over it. Evidently it will take practice.

She also gave us some tips on getting the ideas flowing: i.e., looking at photos to spark memories, telling what happened behind the scenes, looking for common themes in groups of photos, mapping (we drew maps of our childhood bedrooms -- ah, the memories), looking at any common object and writing about what memories come to mind, and free-listing (my personal favorite as I do love my lists!), just to name a few.

When I was growing up I always thought I would be a writer because I have always loved books so much. But somewhere along the way, I stopped writing. It's one of the reasons blogging has been so good for me, just to get me in the habit of writing something again. Now I feel inspired to work on my writing, in little bits and pieces, whenever I can find a little chunk of time. So once again, thanks Jill for yanking me out of my comfort zone and getting me to do something really worthwhile! (Jill of course took some photos and, I'm sure, will have more to contribute to the recap.)