
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.
Category: Uncategorized
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-

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.”…
-
In Creative Writing, we spend time together at the beginning of the school year before splitting into two groups. The freshmen and sophomores (CW I) work with Heather on poetry and fiction. The juniors and seniors (CW II) work with artists and residence on units such as poetry and nonfiction. It’s now February and CW…
-
As our nonfiction unit comes to a close, so does my time in Creative Writing II. In a week, we’ll be in our playwriting unit (this year taught by Sara Broady), which is taught to the whole of Creative Writing. I’ve had the same conversation with several of the other Creative Writing Seniors about our…
-
The second semester has just begun, and with it, the “Sophomore Slump.” I have passed through the excitement of freshman year, whose energy dragged me through the first semester, but now I have arrived at what feels like an endless loop of seemingly irrelevant classes. Although, to be clear, as a student, the subjects on…
-
The relationship between high school and a student attending it is parallel to the relationship that an iron has with the shirt it’s ironing. Both are situations that one usually learns or experiences at a pivotal point in their lives – high school marking the last couple of years where dependence on parents for housing…