Hello English 10b/70b students:
First of all, thank you for being so willing to tackle this task of stating your beliefs about writing. As I taught this class, my own thoughts about writing and creativity have become more clear, and I’m sure they will go through changes the longer that I write and teach, but here are some of my thoughts:
I believe that writing creates a space between us and others that is just enough to see each persons humanity. Often people consider such an empty space to be a negation, an emptiness, but I consider it to be a place of possibility, of wonder, of contemplation. This openness allows us to see each other more clearly, and when our creativity, our creation, leaves our body and makes its appearance in the world, that space is where it makes itself apparent. Without that space, our creations live only within us and then are really only our imaginations. Outside of us, appearing on the page or transmitted through someone’s voice, a piece of writing becomes a phenomenon that others can behold. And, if I’m right, it also becomes a phenomenon that its creator can behold. It lives! It enters that space between us as something that wasn’t there before. Of course, this is the hokey spiritual-chatter that drives me a little crazy sometime, but maybe that’s the point. I don’t even have to agree with this to believe that it’s true.
Please post what you believe below (or a link to wherever you post your own writing):
What is Writing?
Writing is something that forces me to process my life. It is inherently in my nature to run away from things that are difficult, challenging, depressing or frightening. The things I do are shameful, shallow, egotistic, immoral. Consciously and subconsciously, I turn away from my mistakes and regrets and pretend they are not a part of who I am. It’s as if my life is a big house, full of rooms, full of these terrible things that I am and do, and so I run, from room to room, shutting all the doors behind me until I am in one small corner of the big house in which I feel safe. In this small room I create a reality in which I feel comfortable and in control, living a life contained by the parameters of this room, I pretend that the rest of the house dose not exists. I decorate the room, I fill it with activities, decorations, I look out the window, I make it just so, in order to help me pretend like the rest of the house is not there. When I write, I leave that small, safe room and begin to open doors, I begin to look at that which I am, I begin to leave more and more doors wide open, airing dusty neglected memories; when I write, I begin to breath. Writing gives me a chance to process the things I find in the big house of neglect. Its one thing to open the doors, its another to describe what I find in writing. This process is as wonderful as it is frustrating, it can be liberating or debilitating, flowing or fighting.
Writing also gives me a chance to escape the reality my safe room in the big house all together. It is an avenue in which no one can tell me how to write, or when to do it, it is an avenue in which I can evoke emotions and cause avalanches of memories in people, spark an idea and create something beautiful. Something raw, real and intense, even if it is fictional. Writing is the thing which makes me able to deal with all the bull shit, all the strife, internal and external, rational and other-worldly.
The ability to write is especially important in this new electronic age, which allows the exchange of ideas, information, the unrestricted exchange of written word via the world wide web. I did not realize the importance of being able to articulate a point in writing until I began researching to help my Dad write letter after letter to our insurance company and win a huge financial battle in regards to all of my Mom’s surgeries. Writing saved my family from losing everything; and I realize that thousands of other American families in similar circumstances have lost everything because they could not articulate their case in writing against insurance companies. Most probability did not even try.
Writing gives you the freedom to create or inform, to keep dear and private or to share with others, to embrace reality or escape it. Writing is such a powerful tool, it can defend you, represent you, transform you, disguise you, heal you, annoy you, elevate you; writing can do anything you want it to do for you. And to me, that is the true beauty of writing.
I Believe
Because I never would have written this if I hadn’t read Toni Morrison’s, Beloved, for the second time in the fall of 2010, or that poem written on the bathroom wall in that cafe where we used to meet every Sunday for coffee and conversation…
I believe that I am the sum of my parts. All of them. The ones abandoned by the side of the road, or left in empty rooms, doors slammed shut. Parts of me I’ve hurled out of windows, or dropped into someone’s lap. I constitute the parts of myself I have betrayed. I am lost without myself. I am trying to put myself back together. I am trying to tear myself apart. This, I believe has got to be an attempt at reconciliation. These aren’t choices we make but reactions to breaches of our humanity so severe we come asunder as if by some drastic change in atmospheric pressure, as if the earth hit an oil slick and shot forward so fast we left ourselves behind, the tail of some cosmic creature.
I write because every once in awhile a sentence comes together and a part of me falls into place. I write to grow, to understand, to come full circle, to talk myself into or out of, I write as a process, as if I am in process and what more could I possibly hope for.
I Believe by AL
I believe that creative writing is life. We all experience things in our lives, and these things come out in our writing. In writing pure fiction; I find that I am still basing my fictional characters on actual people I know or knew of.
I believe that creating a story is like putting a puzzle together. Sometimes the pieces fit together seamlessly and you have a piece of work that is very satisfying. But more often than not, you have pieces that stick out and must be pounded down or caressed into place (yet they still stick out no matter how hard you try to disguise them). Or even worse, pieces are missing. Yet you still must turn in this puzzle and own up to it as yours. This is the bitterness and sweetness of creating.
I believe that creative writing is a way of revisiting my past and looking at it with a fresh perspective and saying “what if”? Taking that “what if” and making it into a new world. A world of fiction but a fiction that is still personal in some way to my real life.