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Audra Varilek

Dr. Allen

English 319

Sep, 20^th

WC: 1,039

A wise ogre once said, “Ogres are like onions…layers. Onions have layers, ogres have layers, onions have layers. We both have layers.” This seemed like the best way to start off any paper about creative writing. How come you ask? Because it’s creative and because, yes, both ogres and onions have layers, but so do writers. They also both have outside influences pushing down on them and forming them to make them who they are.

Writers are made up of everything around them. The outside influences in our lives from friends, family, and just overall drama makes up who we are. It’s these types of influences that are being suppressed in writing. When I was a little kid in elementary school, I remember being given a picture of something simple and being told to write a story about it. Even though this small writing exercise still had the structure and rules of writing, we were able to write about anything we wanted involving that picture. As I grew up and entered middle school, we were taught the oh-so-generic style of writing of an introduction paragraph, supporting paragraphs and a conclusion. No more creativity, no more free writing. Everything was the same. I was so used to this that by the time I reached my senior year in high school I had pretty much mastered the mind-numbing format. It was in this year that I took a creative writing class. Our first assignment…to write. Write about what? Anything. I was confused. I was always taught something solid and bland in writing papers, I wasn’t sure how to just write for myself. Just write. No topic, no discussion, no editing. Just write.

It was also in my senior year that I took AP English. I thought I’d have been able to do great in this class with the essays and the readings. I was wrong. My teacher, Mr. Frasier, hated the standard styles of writing. He would actually fail the students if they wrote papers based on traditional setup. It was such a shock when we all got our first papers back. Comments such as ‘where are you in this paper’ and ‘who is really writing this’ flooded the pages of our papers. This became my favorite class once I figured out what he really wanted us to do. Just write. Even on essays on books we had read he required us to put ourselves into the paper. This class opened my eyes to a brand new side of English.

One scholar, Peter Elbow, believes that this is the best way for students to learn to free write. He feels that students need to not be influenced by the teacher in their writing, but instead they need to connect to their inner selves as an individual to write. He says that students are born with knowledge and that it just needs to be released. Well I agree with Elbow in that free writing in very important in the classrooms. No interference from teachers about structure or topic is a magnificent way to force students to open up. I however strongly disagree with the lack of outside influences. Just like the onion, everything has some type of outside power to shape and mold it.

However another scholar, David Bartholomae, is more my style. Despite the fact that Bartholomae believes more in academic tradition and writing, while I believe in free and creative writing, he makes an excellent argument about outside influences. He says that what makes up a person is everything in their lives, ranging from race to class to education. Everything in life makes up the whole of the person.

Academic writing is important to learn and understand in a person’s life. It gives them a structure to make better points and organization in their writing. Knowing how to write academically will also help students to better analyze other works from other writers.  It’s this foundation and structure that is used to teach in most classrooms. But maybe it’s time for a change. Teachers need to start teaching and working with creative writing and with free writing.

Many teachers don’t use the creative writing approach in their classrooms at all. They don’t feel it to be necessary for students to really learn how to free write. But by teaching students to write freely and to write what they know, their creativity is being encouraged. Nobody can be taught to be creative. And like how Elbow feels about knowledge being with you when you are born, that’s also how creativity is. It’s already there in a person, but it just needs to be let out and not suppressed by the overpowerment of academic writing. Younger students do need to be taught the format of introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs, but the creative side should not be smothered. They need to be able to just write. Write about what they want and just let the thoughts flow.

            Creative and free writing may seem like two different things, but they are often the same. Most free writing is writing a story or just clearing your head. Any form of free writing is creative. Some people, myself included, are able to write their thoughts better in journals or diaries, but when they are told to free write in a classroom setting they begin to panic. This is mainly due to lack of knowledge on how to free write. Whenever a paper is turned in in a classroom setting, the students try and write what they know the teacher wants to read. But in free and creative writing, students can, basically, be free and creative. The teacher doesn’t even have to read what the students write, but just the fact that the students are writing for themselves is fantastic and will help so much in opening their eyes to a more creative side of English. Creative and free writing are also amazing ways to simply clear your head. Just to write what you’re thinking and to write what you feel. Students should be able to express themselves in their writings. This needs to be available in all classroom settings. Everything around a person influences them in everything they do, and writing should be the same way.