Creativity is Being Yourself

I identified with much of what Professor Nichols wrote in her lectures, especially in the last post when she said, “I felt like a hippie at a business meeting.” I, too, often feel I am in a place I don’t belong – I’m sure we all do at times. But the lecture helped me to remember that fitting in and going with the flow is not always the most positive way to go.  Her personality often came out in her writing and that is the biggest thing I took from this course, that what I write not only needs to be good, it needs to sound like me.

This course was a lot of work, but not in the normal “got a paper to do for school” sort of work. It strained my brain to not only open up, but to make the words that trickle out more concise and to the point. The text book, as well as the lectures by Prof Nichols, was enlightening. Both concentrated not on grammar, but on finding your own voice.

Creativity is a big part of my life in a visual sense. I have a number of creative “hobbies,” but I have to admit that my writing has gotten stale. My job requires me to write about technical topics for a military audience. Writing has become drudgery for me instead of the creative outlet it used to be. The writing I read and critiqued this term helped me to break out of those boundaries. “The quiet kid with the Mohawk, the pecker waving contest,” and other bits of REAL speech helped me to strive to rid my writing of  some of the formality and just be me.

Prof Nichols is right. Writing is hard and I am tired. But it’s a good tired – like you feel when you just completed a nice long hike and are looking forward to the next one. Thanks for that.