Creative Writing

how a class changed my reading and writing

Sitting before her laptop, her fingers find the keys with ease and she smiles as she taps out the words. Her heart is light as she describes the glorious mountains in her city, filling in details of their shades of purple and the way they turn orange when the sun sets. Four months ago, she would have just written, "She had always loved the mountains in her city, the way they oriented her to where she was in the world".

But now, thanks to her teacher with the smile that always seems on the edge of laughter, personal antecdotes about standing in the middle of her street holding a lamp, and the incessant notes "show, show, show" across every paper, her words had changed. She could paint a scene and root the reader to a specific spot, a taste, or smell to bring their body fully into it.

Now, she can't read a novel without imagining every detail of the place, glance, and brow furrow of the main character. The unfortunate thing is, really, that this has shown her how poorly dialogue, setting, and continuity can be done. These days, her nose scrunches and tongue sticks out when she reads a novel that botches dialogue and never shows her where the character is.

Her mind replays the scenes imagined of a man in swim trunks, walking across highways and welcoming himself into every neighbor's yard. The whimsy, the nonsensical actions of a man in his fifites, all come together at the very end with a gut punch of his reality of home lost. Her eyes widen at the power of a short story, something never before explored, the way it can tell a novel's worth of feelings in a thousand to two thousand words.

One more thing that will forever be changed is how she can enjoy a novel or short story that has no pretty bow flourishes at the end.