“We don’t sit in a room all day! No way! No way!” Creative Writing chanted, clad in yellow, from the school bleachers on Field Day. This chant stemmed from the question every Creative Writer at SOTA is frequently asked: “What does Creative Writing do? Write for three hours a day?” As this blog can attest to, we often escape our classroom and venture into the city. Whether it’s to attend field trips and performances, or to strengthen our community by carrying out one of many Creative Writing traditions. If it is the former, our intention is usually to draw inspiration from our surroundings, something we cannot always do from our desks.

For the most part, we do sit in a room all day. That said, we do more than write silently at our desks in the dark for three straight hours. Every class period, we answer a writing prompt written on the board, and either everyone shares their prompts or we volunteer to read them out loud. What follows, depends on what unit we are in: fiction, poetry, playwriting, or a shorter unit that falls under another category. Whoever teaches the class has created a lesson plan that incorporates more than just writing, but also discussions, games, visuals and films, peer editing, reading and analyzing thought-provoking texts–the list goes on!

In response to those who ask what Creative Writing does, we have endless fun making puns, correcting Huck’s grammar, exploring every aspect of writing and being a writer, but also exploring life and the experiences and parts of life that contribute to us as individuals and to our world.