Author: SOTA Creative Writing

  • Things You Can Do When You Turn Eighteen: 1. vote 2. buy spray paint 3. buy a lottery ticket 4. buy things from TV infomercials 5. buy a lighter 6. buy cigarettes (and then promptly throw those away!) 7. buy your own plane ticket 8. rent a hotel room 9. get married 10. drink a…

  • “Gears Turning Poetry Series” at Modern Times Bookstore In Creative Writing, once every six­-week period, each student attends a literary reading that they then write a reflection about. Typically, I go to smaller readings at local bookstores that allow the audience to feel intimate and close with the writer who is being featured. On January…

  • On Tuesday we started our playwriting unit. As a Freshman this is my first time truly delving into playwriting. The only writing of a script that I’ve done is for my portfolio and four to five times on my own. But this year the experience of the unit is new for everyone. In the past…

  • Every marking period (usually six months), Creative Writing students have to turn in a series of things we’ve been working on: submissions, responses to readings we’ve been to, a response to a movie we’ve seen, and a literary critique. These are called “Department Requirements.” Although they’re stressful, time consuming, and kind of a lot of…

  • Senioritis, by Josie Weidner

    “Senioritis. Noun. a supposed affliction of students in their final year of high school or college, characterized by a decline in motivation or performance.” –Google Definitions Let me begin by saying I’ve been listening to a lot of Justin Bieber lately and I totally have senioritis. I’m not sure yet if the two are related.…

  • Writing a poem is always a sort of backwards thing for me. I tend to do it first as a layout of generally what I want in it, a really rough outline of the poem, like the gesture sketch of a character before you actually start to put any details in. After that, the drawing…

  • Before I was accepted into the Creative Writing Department, I often did not read literature outside of young adult novels. I had felt as though I had found my home in-between the lines of badly-written romances. My knowledge of how to develop my writing was, therefore, limited to stories that often existed in the Twilight…

  • The Bus Home by Amina Aineb

    My parents don’t let me ride the bus home at night. Actually, this isn’t totally true. The only buses I have ridden at night were the 44 (which I ride every day anyway) and the 1 (which goes through the Richmond district.) However, I work in the Mission for (fellow CW) Stella’s dad, and according…

  • As a kid, I harbored a secret belief that the way I read was much, much different than the way anybody else read. It wasn’t driven by a superiority complex—I just didn’t understand why people talked about books the way they did. Admittedly, I had no better solution for the problem of how stories should…

  • Go weeks without sleep listening to the same song on repeat. Watch the moon from your window, frown at the lack of stars. Tell yourself you’ll never get tired of looking at the sky. Get tired of looking at the sky. Climb out of your window like an escaping thief to watch the sunrise. End…