The Final Letter

Gary,
I must say that I am quite pleased with the progress I have made over the past six weeks. Prior to taking this class, I wondered if I would really get anything out of it and if it would be worth my while. One of the reasons I took this class over the summer, is because I didn’t want to have to spend 15 weeks taking it at Roberts Wesleyan. Imagine my surprise, when I found that not only was it not a waste of time, but it actually provided me with opportunities to hone skills I had rarely if ever used before.
When it came to writing fiction, I was admittedly concerned. All of the writing I have done in the past twenty plus years has been solely non-fiction. Would I be able to make up things that would constitute an interesting story? I feel the answer was yes. The use of the journal assignments was very helpful as an introduction to writing a whole story. I especially liked the “Beginnings” exercise where the whole focus was simply on coming up with an introductory sentence that would grab the reader’s attention. The other helpful piece, for me anyway, was providing a framework of what you wanted our stories to be about. Having to write a story from scratch would have been difficult; writing a story centered on a particular song, was actually fun. I was able use the song as a springboard for what would happen in the story.
I definitely struggled with the poetry section; but also felt that I learned way more than I thought I would. Certainly I was familiar with terms such as “alliteration” and “metaphor,” but it was great to be able to identify the uses of those terms in poems and then ultimately incorporate them into my own work. One helpful piece was the way the course transitioned from fiction into poetry. The whole short short story to a prose poem made the transition far easier than it would have been if we had just jumped head first into writing poems. The other thing that I really liked about the poetry section was that much of what we wrote about was based on our experiences, rather than trying to craft some love poem written from someone else’s perspective.
I’ll confess, I think the class might have been more engaging for me if I had not taken it online. While the discussion sections were interesting, at least from the perspective of how other people saw writing, there wasn’t the opportunity (or maybe it’s a case of where I didn’t take the opportunity) to flesh out some of the comments that were made. I do feel that this class will be useful once I begin my new career as an elementary school teacher. Writing can be a very dry and boring subject, but utilizing some of the exercises that we did, could certainly engage the kids so that they actually feel the same creative flow that I did over the last few weeks.

Jim