I studied creative writing in college.
Not “novel writing” or “writing that people will pay money for,” but creative writing, which is exactly what it sounds like. Writing that is creative.
What are some examples of writing that is creative*?
I loafe and invite my Soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.
The smoke of my own breath;
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine;
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood
and air through my lungs;
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore, and
dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn;
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice, words loos’d to the eddies
of the wind;
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms;
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag;
The delight alone, or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and
hill-sides;
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and
meeting the sun.
Imagine if your major was advertising and you specialized in creative advertising. On first glance you might say, “Isn’t all advertising creative?”
No siree bob. Here, take a look at this advertisement:
Can you guess what it’s for?
No?
Well, that’s because it’s a creative advertisement. Sure, it looks like just a black box, but you’ve got to look deeper than the surface. Here, look at the image below that explains the creative process of interpreting this:
Still don’t get it? Well, if we do a Wikipedia search on black boxes, we find that it is a metaphor for the human brain. Or, more specifically:
[it focuses] upon a thing that has no immediately apparent characteristics and therefore has only factors for consideration held within itself hidden from immediate observation.
In other words, I’m selling AJAX.
“But, wait a minute. AJAX is white.”
“Exactly.”
You don’t study how to be creative. Creative is a given. If you’re a bar of chocolate, you don’t study how to be sweet. You already are sweet. Unless you’re the bitter kind, but in that case, all of the studying in the world wouldn’t make you sweet, because then you wouldn’t be bitter chocolate anymore. And even if you were able to become a sweet bitter chocolate, would you even know how to be sweet and bitter at the same time? Would finding the right balance between tasting good and giving people aftertastes even be a pleasant experience for you?
In creative writing school, the A students write like this**:
The B students write somewhere between this***:
and this:
And the C, D, and F students are based on how many assignments they didn’t turn in.
So, basically, if you don’t write like a famous writer from 50 years ago, whose books are available in the student bookstore, you won’t get an A.
But, remember, this is creative writing school. Your success is based off of your ability to sound creative to your teacher (and you get the Tinder Boost for mimicking their favorite authors).
What if, however, each creative writing teacher had their students print out copies of their work, staple them in the center, have art department students design the cover, and put all of them out for sale around campus? Who would be the A students then? The ones who sounded the most like Virginia Woolf, or the ones who sold the most copies?
When I wrote Planet Lazy, I realized that I was not writing a book to please a creative writing teacher at a university and other creative writing students around me. I was writing to please my readers.
I realized that these days people have many options for entertainment. They can play Call of Duty on their Xbox One’s, post videos on Instagram, read Marvel comics, binge-watch Breaking Bad for the 6th time on Netflix, listen to Kanye West albums, complain about Trump on Reddit, and very last on that list for many people comes reading novels. I was aware of this, so I wrote Planet Lazy in a style that is engaging and competes with all of the other distractions of the 21st century. While I’ll never be as brilliant as Seth MacFarlane (creator of Family Guy) or Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon (creators of Rick and Morty), I did have those shows in mind as competition for your attention.
In short, I wrote Planet Lazy so that people could have fun! You love having fun, and now you can do it with a science fiction! That is why you will love my book.
Planet Lazy (A Science Fiction Comedy), now available on Amazon Kindle and paperback. (KINDLE BOOK ON SALE FOR $0.99 UNTIL MARCH 5TH! BUY NOW BEFORE IT GOES UP TO REGULAR PRICE!!)
*Lines from a Walt Whitman poem.
**Quote by Virginia Woolf
***Quote by Kurt Vonnegut
Planet Lazy 