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.

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  • Writing Inside-Out, by Isi Vazquez

    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 metaphor stops working, unless you draw an eye and then a finger and then a nose and then decide that the person doesn’t actually need fingers, and that you like the drawing with just one eye, which most artists don’t generally do when they’re drawing people. At any rate, poems are less straightforward than a drawing, at least for me. They always tend to have hidden lines that I have to write seven or eight times before I get them quite right, and there’s always that weird feeling at the beginning and the end, when you’re not sure if that’s really where the piece starts or where it ends. Poetry is less about the artist themselves and more about organizing twenty-six letters in a way that they need to be.

    The actual process of writing a nice piece that you can turn in to some publishing companies or, infinitely more frightening, your creative writing teacher, is a convoluted process for me. I sketch it out, and then I detail it in. The original draft for a lot of poems is very loose and raw, and often makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. This actually used to be really discouraging for me, since when reading you only get to see the nice, polished, finished work and sometimes I forget that a lot of editing went into that final product, and the author didn’t just miraculously spit it out and show it to the world. I’ve since had it drilled into me that editing is a) vital, and a part of every piece, and b) one of the things I enjoy most in writing. It’s always so much harder to get out that first bit of what you want to say. Once that’s all out, you can take away words and phrases that don’t make sense, and add words and phrases that are appropriate.

    There’s also that phrase in writing – kill your darlings. Take out bits of a poem you love, because it doesn’t have a place or doesn’t fit or is simply unnecessary. That’s the hardest part of editing. I have a couple documents that are just bits and pieces of old writing that I loved and had to take out. They’re recyclable – you can use them in other stories if they fit. It’s always a fun exercise when I write a poem based around the fragment of another poem I really liked.

    Writing a poem is an inside-out process for me, because my brain thinks in weird, wiggly, jumpy patterns. Everyone thinks differently, and everyone writes poetry differently. Don’t be afraid of your poems, and don’t berate yourself because you have a different process than so-and-so. Just write your own way, in your own time, and hopefully find something in it you love.

    Isi Vasquez, class of 2019

  • Read A Book, by Harmony Wicker

    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 universe. It seemed to me, in my pre-high school days, that I could learn everything I needed know by sticking to what I already knew. I never imagined that I could find pleasure in the words of old English novels, contemporary poetry, personal narrative, autobiographies, translated stories, and culturally diverse work. (The list goes on.) In this way, I am thankful for the Creative Writing Department because it pushed me to overcome my fear of venturing beyond teenage pulp fiction.

    By being introduced to unfamiliar ways of storytelling, I was able to gain new insights into the art of writing. I learned how to comprehend complex writing, which helped me get a better understanding of what literature could accomplish. The world of complex literature had opened up to me. Somehow, I learned an amazing code that lets me join some bootleg version of The Breakfast Club where reading and writing is at the center of our lives. As I read a range of literary forms from the plays of Shakespeare, to the inclusive poetry of Walt Whitman, and the beautiful language of Audre Lorde, I became more comfortable in my ability to understand writing.

    As I am guided toward new genres and literary forms by the curriculum and teachers of the Creative Writing Department, more and more of these stories surface, and I get to discover them. These discoveries make me excited to develop my own writing and ideas about life. And by doing so, I have become a more entertaining, intelligent, and engaging person. Hopefully, I will continue to venture into the large variety of unfamiliar genres so that I drive myself to be the most amazing version of me.

    Harmony Wicker, class of 2018

  • The Bus Home by Amina Aineb

    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 to my parents riding a bus through the Mission at night is “NOT GOING TO HAPPEN, AMINA.” It’s winter, so it’s been getting dark pretty early, and since my parents usually aren’t available to drive me home, this means I have been working considerably less. As in like, two hours in the past two months. Which means I’m broke as hell and the little money I do have is being drained on lunchtime sandwiches from Mollie Stone’s.

    It’s a pretty direct route from Valencia Street to my house, just a ride on the 33 and then a short trip on the 1. It’s completely doable, and I’ve done it a thousand times in daylight. But apparently, my parents have the idea that as soon as the sun sets, suspicious characters pile on the bus like clowns in a car.

    Recently I was working and told my mom I would be bussing home. She seemed adamant that that was not a possibility, until I mentioned, “Oh yeah and my boyfriend will be bussing with me,” and then she was fine with it.<

    WHY?! If any parents read this blog, please sit your daughters down and tell them to try to be as safe as they can, but PLEASE do not take away their right to ride public transport by themselves! The idea that a woman is in danger unless accompanied by a man makes is so belittling, and it honestly makes me feel like I’m a child who needs constant supervision and protection. (Ok I am a minor, but you all know what I mean…) As my friend Hanne pointed out to me when I asked her about this, many girls will one day be living on their own in a city, and it’s important to learn how to navigate your way home by yourself, even if the sun isn’t out. And while I know my parents are just trying to protect me, the way they’re doing it is only enforcing the patriarchal nature of our society. Sigh.

    Amina Aineb, class of 2017

  • Talking About Reading by Colin Yap

    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 be discussed. I adopted the personal policy that talking about stories ruins them, and that was it for me. Nobody had the right to muck up the pipeline between the individual writer and the individual reader.

    Growing as both a writer and reader in the Creative Writing Department has forced me to confront this prejudice. The principal exercise of the department is deconstruction: the dismantling and analysis of the working parts of poems, stories, and plays. No sentence is left untouched, and no theme unnoticed in our discussions. While for most of my young life I thought of this act as poisonous, I’ve come to realize the value in a shared understanding. The more I talk about words and stories, the more I understand them, in a way that is wonderfully separate from myself. There was no big event that spurred this change, just a gradual willingness to step outside of my singular interpretation, and appreciate the hundreds of different ways a piece could be read. In this way, I began to understand the miracle of the word “I,” in fiction and in life, with its innumerable owners.

    Being a part of Creative Writing means being a part of a community that values the intentionality of words above all else. It means being a part of a group of people who cares about writers: about Eliot, Hemingway, Murakami. But most of all, we care about each other, and the work each of us is producing. We critique and compliment and push one another. I think my younger self underestimated the idea of conversation surrounding stories. I maintain the belief that I read and write in a much different way than everybody else. However, it’s not a phenomenon that’s exclusive to me. For all of my high school years, I’ve been able to surround myself with people who love words as much I do. They’ve shown me how much I love to debate, to talk endlessly about stories, and made me a believer in a community of lovers of language. 

    Colin Yap, class of 2016

  • How To Embody Wanderlust by Charlotte Pocock

    1. 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 up scaring a large dog across the street.
    2. Invest in too many maps and too many pins. Pin the places you want to go in white and the places you have been in red. Congratulations, your white to color ratio is now equal to the U.S. Congress. Get angry. Take down the map.
    3. Create a five-page list of the places you want to go. Loose the list. You temporarily give up hope. I mean, you don’t even have a job.
    4. Try for months to capture this feeling, this constant reminder that you are here and not everywhere else. Fail.
    5. Create a tumblr tag titled “places”. Fill it with pictures of great cities and not-so-great landscapes. Spend three hours scrolling through the “Prague” tag.
    6. Receive money from your grandparents for your birthday. Tell your grandmother you’re going to run away to Prague. She won’t believe you. You don’t believe you. What are you even going to do in Prague?
    7. Watch others explain that they often write about the experiences they’re not having and the frustration it ensues. Repress the urge to stand up and scream YESYESYES at the top of your lungs.
    8. Download a bus route app on your phone. Find out that you can get to Seattle in twenty-three hours and eleven minutes. Get off at the bus stop and stare at the train for five minutes. Go home.
    9. Tell your friend about the Seattle incident. They don’t believe you. You don’t believe you. What are you even going to do in Seattle?
    10. Accept that you’re going to be stuck for a couple years. You’re going to be stuck your entire life. But maybe, one day, you’ll be stuck somewhere else.

      Charlotte Pocock, class of 2019

  • Stories Are Everywhere by Lena Hartsough

    I see stories everywhere. In every face I examine, in every short phrase I overhear, and in every label or sign I read.

    For instance, one day I was at my friend’s house with her and another friend. We were finishing her enormous carton of Odwalla®, and I noticed that on the back of the carton it said, “Separation is natural – shake it up!®” For some reason, I found this hilarious. I pointed it out to my friend, while our host sorted records on the floor, and she laughed too. We thought up scenarios for the phrase, including quite a few puberty classes. She thought that it would be the puberty teacher telling students that it’s natural for boys and girls to grow apart as they grow older, and I said it was a world where humans are born without a butt crack, and the separation spoken of is when the buttocks separate from one into two.

    I think the reason we attributed the simple sentence to a puberty class was because it seemed a bit condescending. The exclamation point made it sound like an overexcited teacher when we read it out loud.

    Although that situation was comedic, this penchant of mine for seeing stories has often helped me find inspiration for my writing. Many of my ideas for pieces to write come from songs or smaller stories that I find. In fact, as I write this post, I quickly type down another idea onto my list of story inspirations. It came from a song I just heard.

    Lena Hartsough, class of 2019

  • Poetry? by Julieta Roll

    In Creative Writing we are currently in our Poetry Unit. This means that at the beginning of art CW 2 (seniors and juniors) and CW 1 (sophomores and freshman) split and go into their own classes to study and learn about the broad exhilarating topic of poetry. I am in CW 1, I’m a freshman, and I have to say at first I had my doubts about poetry. I never thought I was any good at it, and found writing a poem stressful, like I had to make each line fit in it’s exact place so it sounded right. In the CW 1 Unit we’ve been analyzing mountains of poetry, and I’ve discovered and read so many poets I’d never even heard of. I feel I’ve been opened up, and I’ve been quite enjoying sitting down every night and writing a poem. I think it’s because I’ve found that poetry is freedom to me. I can write whatever I want and it feels personal and contains a lot of meaning. It’s like my own little seashell. When people would ask if I liked to write poetry or fiction better my response would always be ‘fiction’ no doubt about it, but now I’m rethinking. I know I still have a lot to learn about writing and I feel I shouldn’t rope myself to one type of writing or the other just yet but it was interesting to me to how easily I sunk into poetry. We’ll just have to see what happens.

    Julieta Roll, class of 2019

  • A Discussion on Sappho and Commas by Ren Weber

    A Discussion on Sappho and Commas by Ren Weber

    Today the entirety of Creative Writing had a long and passionate conversation about the American school grading system (and the problems that entail). Then, with only forty minutes of class left, CWII left with Maia and the rest of us remained with Heather. She told us a story about rediscovering a book with Sappho poetry, and thus we began the reading.

    First we read the foreword that included this Latin phrase: “Non omnis moriar, magnaque pars mei vitabit Libitinam.” With the power of the blessed Internet and temperamental school wifi we learned that this meant, “Not all die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.”

    Something quite a bit of us realized early on about Sappho’s poetry is that each one is about 3-4 lines (at least, the poems we read). Another thing I found interesting about the process of annotating and discussing short poems, though, is that they held incredible amount of things to talk about in those short lines. Her poetry writing felt (in Heather’s words): “Sweet, sensual, luxurious.”

    Then the topic came to the line in Sappho’s poem “Standing by my bed,” and it goes: “In gold sandals / Dawn that very / moment awoke me.” With short poems like this, there were so many different ways to understand it. Is the narrator waking up standing by the bed? Does the narrator sleepwalk? Is it Dawn standing by the bed? Is the poet personifying the Dawn?

    Eventually we came to one understanding of the poem as Dawn wearing gold sandals, standing by a bed. Then we thought about how there could be a comma between “Dawn” and “that”. Upon remembering that these poems were written in (if I recall correctly) 3 BC, we asked ourselves: Were there even commas back then?

    With another round of research we learned that commas didn’t exist at that time. Later we realized that commas could be found in other poems in the same collection, and those were simply the result of the poems’ translation.
    Only two days in the Poetry Unit, days and lessons like these make me feel very excited for what is to come.

    Ren Weber, class of 2019

  • Remedial Spanish with Junot Díaz by Sophie Mazoschek

    Thanks to three years of high school classes, I’ve developed a mild dislike of Spanish. I still think it’s a beautiful language, especially when spoken out loud, but it’s become synonymous in my mind with the perpetual and formulaic boredom of school. Every assignment we ever get seems to ask for the same thing: List five subjunctive triggers. Translate this paragraph about buying grapes. Conjugate this verb into this tense. And so on. As I result I sometimes zone out in class and miss chunks of new material.

    If I flew to Spain tomorrow I might be able to ask such philosophical questions as: “Where is the hotel?” or “How much does this fish cost?”. I could talk about when to use the indicative tense vs. the subjunctive, or rattle off a list of impersonal expressions. Pero yo no puedo decir nada importante.

    Yesterday I picked up a book of short stories by Dominican American writer Junot Díaz entitled “This Is How You Lose Her”. As of now I’m about halfway through and what’s struck me the most, even more than Díaz’s brazen, poetic voice, are the fragments of Spanish phrases and slang (some of them pretty dirty) that are peppered throughout the book. While some words can be figured out through context clues, Google Translate or spanishdict.com is usually necessary to wade through particularly dense sections. These occur when characters converse with one another, slipping seamlessly between two languages, and when Yunior, Díaz’s womanizing narrator, describes his various girlfriends or sucias (side chicks). The girls always have some defining adjective or carefully thought out term of endearment attached to their names: flaca, hermosa, prieta, guapisima. Indiecita o Dominicana o Blanquita. To understand these characters you have to research the definitions of these words as well as their possible subtexts, to understand why Yunior would assign each one to each particular girl. Junot Díaz is inadvertently teaching me more Spanish than I’ve learned in the past six months.

    I can’t tell you exactly why This Is How You Lose Her” has changed my attitude so drastically in less than 24 hours. Maybe it’s because of the intense and palpable tenderness Díaz feels for his characters and for his own Dominican heritage, which breathes life back into words and phrases I’d previously only seen in emotionless textbook paragraphs. Maybe it’s the fact that his multilingual writing captures a depth and richness of culture that’s rarely present in plain English prose. Or maybe I just needed a break from classrooms and repetitive homework assignments.

    I’d highly recommend “This Is How You Lose Her,” to anyone with an interest in languages or excellent short stories, no matter what your native tongue is. Also, please pay attention in Spanish class.

    Sophie Mazoschek, class of 2016

  • On Reading Female Authors: Or, How I Learned to Love the 21 st Century by Emma Eisler

    On Reading Female Authors: Or, How I Learned to Love the 21 st Century by Emma Eisler

    As many people reading this may know, I spent the first two years of my high school experience reading a lot, and I do mean a lot, of dead male authors. This began with my heady and emotionally tumultuous reading of On the Road in the middle of freshman year and continued on with shorter and slightly less passionate love affairs with Hunter S. Thompson, Henry Miller, Hemingway, and a host of other narcissists who many of us know and, rightfully, adore. This is not to say that I never read books by women or that I was intentionally avoiding leading a more varied literary life, but, if we’re being honest, a large percentage of my reading did fit into that category.

    Then I started junior year and realized I needed, badly, to expand my horizons and, maybe even more importantly, become a little less obsessed with past decades or movements I’d missed and a little more obsessed with all the great books being written right now and all the potential energy of this decade. And so I read Karen Russell. And then I read Miranda July. And then I read Maria Semple. And then I read Aimee Bender. And then I read Marina Keegan. And, most importantly, I read Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. And it changed everything. Here was this woman who I’d never before met writing down pretty much my exact manifesto on how I want to live—always remembering to be grateful for and to fully inhabit every day and every moment. This, I think, was the moment I became a modern girl, and by that I don’t mean that I suddenly relinquished my cape of nostalgia or downloaded a snap-chat. What I mean is, after sixteen years of trying to travel backwards in time with a respectable degree of success, I started wanting, not to go forwards even, but to exist and make the most of exactly where I am. Right now.

    Emma Eisler, class of 2017