
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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Creative writing has given me many new friends and relationships. Since the beginning of the year, we have been doing community building activities almost every single day. We are currently in our film poem unit, making short videos and experimenting with props, camera angles and cinematography while incorporating what we already know about writing into…
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Since the beginning of the year, our whole department has implemented a daily practice into our routines, freewriting for thirty minutes a day. We are currently in our fiction unit, reading short stories and having fruitful discussions about the embedded meaning within a piece of work. In the past, fiction was intimidating, as I’ve struggled…
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One of my favorite benefits of being in Creative Writing is how in love with art Heather Woodward is. Often class will be positively derailed for a trip to the SFMoMA or the De Young Museum. Just the other week we joined a virtual event hosted by MoAD: “Art As We See It | Indigo…
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In Creative Writing, we have recently begun our fiction unit with an encouraging teacher, Christian Wilburn. We started the unit with perhaps the most important part of writing, the process. The past year and a half I spent in Creative Writing, my work has been inconsistent. Sometimes I would write pieces that I would be…
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I have an unfortunate aversion to any sort of schedule. I know this, and I have known this for as long as I’ve ever been forced to follow a schedule. Whether related to soccer practice or taking vitamins, daily tasks and chores have never been my strong suit. I hate procrastinating, but it’s one of…
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Fiction has always been a favorite genre of mine. Whenever we can work on the craft of fictional storytelling, I always find myself simultaneously excited and intrigued. I am constantly hypothesizing on what we, as a department, could be doing differently from last school year, and the school year before that. This year, what our…
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Under the instructor of our fiction teacher, Christian Wilburn, we have been doing generation exercises in preparation for our final short story project. The goal is to create many different, unfiltered story ideas and let our minds roam, hopefully unearthing a few golden ideas from the rubble. Christian told us to ask questions about preconceived…
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Throughout the school year, the Creative Writing Department will have a number of different units: the poetry unit, the playwriting unit,—and my personal favorite—the fiction unit. Fiction, for me, has always been the best part of writing—since I was a kid I thought this. The fact that I can build a whole world in my…
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This past weekend, Creative Writing went on our annual camping trip to Kirby Cove. During community weeks, our department head, Heather Woodward, organizes the overnight trip from Saturday to Sunday morning. Although the site is difficult to get, we always manage to find a way to lock our trip into place. Heather has spearheaded this…
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I was never sure what it meant to write a poem without making it some fun game about rhyming each line. In elementary and middle school poetry assignments I would try to use the weirdest words I could find, then subsequently attempt to rhyme the word orange. I thought I was so clever using the…