Okay, it is confession time. I have never completed a creative writing course in my life! As some of you may know, I have always loved literature and spent most of my childhood in libraries with my nose in a book and writing silly little short stories. When I took the leap of faith and finally decided that I was going to get serious about my writing, I did what most people at this stage of their writing career do. What is that you ask? Well, I signed up for a creative writing course at the college. I just figured it must be the obvious next step. Correct? WRONG!

Why I ever thought that I needed someone else to tell me how I was supposed to write, I really have no idea. Maybe I had been a little too much into a good bottle of pinot grigio when I signed up. I threw away too much of my hard earned dollars towards a course that I quit after only three classes. Don’t get me wrong; I am not saying that there is no value in these courses. It might be exactly what some writers need, but for me, it was frustrating more than anything. If you are someone who needs rules and structure to function, then perhaps a creative writing course would be good for you. In my experience, however, most of us who thrive in the world of creative arts are free thinkers with our own unique view of what that means. To be bound by a set way of doing things, structured by a strict collection of rules within a process, caused my muse to go on strike.

So, what am I trying to say? Well, simply this; do whatever works for you. Creative writing is exactly that, creative. If every writer, artist, philosopher, or scientist had refused to think outside the box, just imagine how different the world would be today.

When I sit down to write a novel, I do not spend hours on plot lines, character planning, or any of those other tedious things. I just sit down and write. I have an idea in my head for a story and the characters in it when I start, but that’s it. Quite often when I start writing a novel, I don’t know how it is going to end. The story carries me through it the way it wants to and I am happy to go along for the ride. Often my family will pop their heads into my office and ask me questions about how it will end or if their favorite character will survive and my common response, which admittedly infuriates them, is that I don’t know yet. Have I tried to write the way they said I should in those college classes? Yes, I have and trying was as far as I got.

Of course, there are rules that have to be followed in terms of grammar, formatting, spelling and that sort of stuff but that is the last thing that I think of when I am sitting down and writing my story. Worrying about those things comes after I have completed the first draft. There is no room for thinking outside the creative box until I have bled my story onto the pages of the first draft. For any of you that write, you know that when your muse is speaking, you do not do anything to disrupt that flow of words. There is nothing more dangerous in my household than interrupting my writing when I am on a roll.

I will leave you all with my final thought on this topic. An artist who allows themselves to be shackled by the expectations of others will never truly be able to share their unique vision with the world; only a copy of what has already been seen.