Greatest Creative Writing

When I was in my senior year of high school, I took a creative writing class with my best friend. We were really looking forward to writing lots of new short stories, since we had been doing it on our own anyway for a while. We wanted more feedback than just the feedback we gave to each other. However, we were disappointed by the creative writing class. Instead of creating lots of literature like we had thought was going to happen, we just wrote lots and LOTS of poetry. I mean tons of poetry. A whole composition notebook FULL of poetry. My friend and I didn't even like poetry, and this increased our dislike for it.

There were a few good exercises that we did in class, though. My favorite one (at least the one that I can remember the most) involved magazine cutouts. Our homework assignment was to go home and cut out a picture from a magazine, the internet, or a newspaper that had one or more person in it. Then, when we came into class, we shuffled all the pictures together and passed them out among the groups of four people. For three to five minutes, we had to write the background of the person(s) in the photo, or describe in a narrative what was going on in the photo. When the time limit was up, we would pass the photo to our right and repeat the process. We did this for a total of three times, and then shared our favorite piece with our neighbors. I really enjoyed this assignment  because there was a basis for my creativity to shine. I didn't have to think up what my character looked like or how he/she acted, because it was all right there in the picture. I just had to make up the situation, which was nice. I also came up with some really great stories from the exercise, which was really nice. It was loads better than the poetry I'd written all year.