This is the Creative Writing department’s first year with our wonderful new department head, Emily Wolahan—and for me, writing is less stressful than it has been since middle school. 

For the past two years, I have found myself plagued with writers’ block whenever I receive a Creative Writing assignment. Our teacher starts the timer for a short writing prompt, and all I can do is look around the room and wonder if I’ll have to share out afterwards. Sometimes a sentence might come to me, but I’ll have no idea how to expand. Alternatively, I’ll have an entire world in my head, but be at a loss for how to express it. When I finally decide what to write, I cross out every other word until I’m left with a mangled mess of a page. My aim has always been to write something “good”—something I would be proud to share—even if that would mean putting on a tone I didn’t like, exaggerating my experiences, or using an ocean metaphor for the millionth time.

For the poetry unit this year, though, Emily has designed a few assignments that have broken me out of my usual writing style. Earlier this week, we read Franny Choi’s “Glossary of Terms,” a poem in which Choi chooses four words and then writes her poem in the form of a chart with columns for meaning, origin, antonym, and so on. Our assignment was to create our own glossary of terms using words that were significant to us. We also did a mini-unit on erasure poetry, a form where you pick words from an existing piece of writing and create a new poem. These form-based prompts create a structure for my poems, a starting point that doesn’t require a flash of sudden inspiration. But more importantly, they take the emphasis off of writing a “good” poem. Few creative writers had experimented with either of these forms before, so we were more focused on muddling through than writing anything profound.

Our work with form has made me realize that there is no trick to “being inspired.” It doesn’t mean tapping into some hidden well of ideas. It doesn’t mean staring into space until inspiration strikes. Inspiration is not something that simply happens to you—it means taking a word and running with it, writing without any thought of what your piece might become. And even if it means filling my notebook with lines I might never use, I’m loving the opportunity to write down my untailored thoughts.