I like the book that Dr. Amidon is having us read for class: Inside Creative Writing, Graeme Harper, ed. With 15 cr hrs to go on my Master's degree after this semester, the academic angst is morphing into career angst: will this degree have any practical application? Will it get me where I want to go? Where exactly do I want to go? Yikes.

This book is a description of the process of creative writing as explained by several writers who were asked a series of thought-provoking questions. The authors interviewed are "people who in some way see creative writing as their profession; or, at very least, something they do with some form of human exchange in mind." p. 17

Without going into great detail on the questions asked or who wrote the responses, here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

...great writing doesn't just descend in one burst of genius, it evolves over long periods of time. p.22

Childhood plays a considerable role in creative writing beginnings. p.26 (I explored this with my initial piece for the class, "Frosty the Snowflake")

Creative writers take a high degree of personal responsibility for deciding to begin to write, and for continuing to do so. p. 38

and my favorite to date:

What we often don't understand when we start out writing is that writing is re-writing is re-writing is re-writing. p. 44

Tru dat! Good thing I so enjoy the re-writing process.

I trust that my skills will continue to develop and, I hope, bring personal satisfaction and enjoyment to my readers. Whether I will ever be privileged to make a living at it remains to be seen. Inside Creative Writing serves to remind me to enjoy and appreciate being a writer.