5. Discover Your Other Selves
Before taking a creative writing class most days I looked like this:
But now some days I look like this:
And other days, especially after a haircut, I look like this:
And once, on a particularly inspired day, I even looked like this:
2. One word: How-on-earth-did-they-do-that?
Here is one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems:
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts
The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—
There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.
To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;
And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;
Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full
And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,
You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,
You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.
I first read this poem what I was 19, and the only thing I knew was that I loved it. I lacked any way to articulate what exactly I found so appealing (Stevens’ use of imagery, metaphor, and voice, his wildly inventive details). To put it simply: I lacked the ability to understand and discuss craft.
By taking a creative writing class at CSC you won’t just read fantastic works of art, you will also learn how to talk and think about how these works are constructed and how–perhaps most important–these approaches can be applied to your own writing.
3. Get Published
All published work begins somewhere, and the creative writing classroom at CSC is just about the best place in all of northwestern Nebraska for your words to begin their journey.
2. You’ll Meet This Man
No, not really.
1. Join a Community of Writers
Perhaps the greatest misconception of being a writer is this:
Yes, there are moments you have to sit at a desk and put in the required time and effort. However, by joining a creative writing class at CSC you will discover, much like this song suggests (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj5zqg9sHuY), you do not have to do it alone. A creative writing classroom allows you to join a community of writers, a support network of thinkers, who not only want to see you succeed but will offer assistance for you to realize your deepest and most interesting self.
Chadron State College English 