Final thoughts

Over the course of the semester I feel that I have learned quite a bit. My approach to creative writing began as very cynical but has progressed into something of which I am proud. I know about spelling and grammar and rules of standard American English, which have been very hard to break, but I now feel that a creative approach to writing is something of value that I will continue to experiment with. Thursday's class especially put everything into perspective, I think. Our discussion regarding how our blunt, honest, and creative insticts are beaten out of us from years of school really made me feel guilty and upset. It's unfortunate that writing has been labeled as something rigid and difficult by authority figures on the matter and that notion motivates me to break the chains of writing preconceptions, because they really appear to serve as more of a limitation in many settings.
In terms of my writing style, the Goldberg book has been very helpful. Most notable, though, are the bits about concrete detail. I know I've written about them in a past entry, but concrete detail has both simplified my writing attempts and made them exponentially better at the same time. I never knew that detail could be so concrete, I guess. Maybe the reason I had troubles in the past with details is because I put much emphasis on things that didn't really matter and things that didn't contribute to the plot. Who cares what color pants and character was wearing or what day of the week it was?
Another thing, I always struggled to describe things with words that really didn't describe so much as string a train of adjectives, one after another. But it's as simple as describing something that's concrete, like a "blue sea" to describe "her eyes," or like the "fire of a thousand suns" to describe "my body temperature after running around the restaurant in my struggle to wait on 10 tables at one time." Learning how to effectively describe using concrete details has been the most useful to me in my writing, especially my fiction/essay writing, over the course of the semester.