
CREATIVE WRITING
at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco
Welcome! CW develops the art and craft of creative writing through instruction, collaboration, and respect. This blog showcases STUDENT WRITING and how to APPLY to Creative Writing.
Author: SOTA Creative Writing
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Every once in a while, in the midst of writing all sorts of prompts and small pieces, you strike gold. It’s a rare thing, when you write a piece you can’t seem to outwrite for a long while. When it does happen, you at first don’t realize it, either. Typical, I find myself turning in…
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Upon entering the Creative Writing Department at SOTA, I was surprised to learn that, aside from the expected Fiction and Poetry units, there would also be a Playwriting unit taught by a real playwright. I had avoided the choice to write a play for my audition portfolio—the thought of creating a whole, live scene on…
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When I left the house on the morning of Friday, February 22, I had no idea that was the day I’d go viral. Instead of going to Chemistry class, I walked downtown and joined a small rally outside Dianne Feinstein’s office. Three young students had written a letter to Senator Feinstein urging her to support…
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In April of 2018, I was diagnosed with a rare migraine condition known as New Daily Persistent Headache, or NDPH. The details are vague and, from what I can gather, not fully ironed out. The basics of my condition are as followed: two days before my seventeenth birthday, I was recovering from the common cold…
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I will admit, through gritted teeth, I miss—and mourn—the poetry unit. This sentiment is strange indeed, for I do consider myself to be a grander writer of fiction, and although I respect poetry and understand its’ appeal, I tend to detest the act of creating it on most days. What a funny thing it is,…
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Still at the start of our playwriting unit, it easily shows how little I know about writing for the stage. Poetry and fiction I had experience reading and writing, so went into those units with some prior knowledge. Playwriting, on the other hand, is a completely new experience. At the unit’s start, we began discussing…
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For one week, in preparation for the playwriting show, our Creative Writing class was comprised of nothing but small group workshops. We would all come into class with four copies of our drafts we had been working with. On the board, there would be groups of four, ideally with one student from each grade, and…
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CW 1 is currently in its fiction unit, and we are beginning to workshop our short stories. The first story I wrote in this unit was in response to a prompt, which called for a story about an object endowed with magical powers, and the child’s imagination. At first, I was worried, as I have…
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Class discussions are a big part of Creative Writing, and we all have our own different opinions about the works that we read in class. These conversations are often hard for me because I get lost while reading very easily, and I tend to freeze up and stay quiet during class discussions. When we entered…
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During my past two years in the Creative Writing department, I considered myself a fiction writer, and if not that, then a novice playwright, but I never once thought of myself as a poet. I went through two poetry units with a passionate disdain for stanzas, similes, and simply anything most would associate with “poetry.”…