This past week was Spring Break for the lovely University of Kansas, which really meant it was a week full of lifeguarding (for the money), homework (for the school), and naps (for the me). It was a pretty relaxing week, all-in-all, but there was one certain part of it that irked me.
One of my homework assignments for over the break was a creative story for, you guessed it, a creative writing class I'm currently taking. It can be about anything my little heart desires and can be any length (only the first 25-pages will be critiqued in class, though). Seems like it should be a piece of cake, right?
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Wrong.
This was assigned to my class a couple weeks ago, and, even though it's due this Tuesday, I am no closer to completing it than I was then. I have writer's block something bad, so obviously I figured I should do the writers thing and, you know, write about it. The following are just a few activities I've done with this terrible monkey on my back.
1) Spent an entire shift at work (four hours, to be precise) thinking of various ideas.
This was largely unsuccessful. It's not like I don't have any ideas for this assignment, it's that all the ideas are basically terrible and had to be thrown out. One that I thought of, and immediately discarded, was writing the story of a tree. A tree.
2) Did any other homework possible.
It's really simple when you have a presentation to prepare, three articles to read, two short stories to read, four accounting problems to work through, ten Italian assignments to do, and numerous other homework nonsense that I'm currently forgetting to pretend that one silly little creative story doesn't actually exist.
3) Ask everyone for ideas.
My friends, my family, my boyfriend, random people, the internet. I asked everyone for ideas on what I could write about, and when I narrowed what ideas I liked the best, I polled people and made them choose their favorite. I could tell that I was getting slightly annoying, but I suppose I'm a perfectionist.
Me:
Literally everyone else:
4) Latch onto an idea, spend two hours outlining various aspects of it (characters, setting, etc.), then throw it all away because it's all wrong.
'Nuff said.
5) Question life.
I still consider myself a new English major, so it's not exactly a confidence boost when I can't seem to grasp what should be an easy assignment. So, I sat back and questioned my life choices just a bit.
6) Stopped being lame, and started be awesome instead.
I know that "I had writers block" won't be an acceptable excuse for my professor, so I'm going to have to suck it up and write about something. Honestly, I know that I just have to get over my perfectionism, find an idea that I enjoy, and write the stinkin' story. If (and when) I can do that, I know that I'll write an amazing story. A journey of a thousand pages begins with one word.
