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Faith Worthington

Hana Jabr, Instructor

ENGL 2250

December 6, 2022

My Final Thoughts

Writing has been my biggest passion since I was young. Throughout middle school and

high school I’ve always taken creative writing classes, writing in my free time, and unfortunately

also writing fanfiction when I was 12. Whenever I look back at my pieces, I cringe and laugh in

embarrassment–although I refuse to reread the fanfiction. Nevertheless, where I found flaws in

my writing, others didn’t. I cruised through each creative writing course I took, passing with

flying colors and little criticism from my peers.

It sucked. I wanted people to tell me that something was wrong, that something was

confusing or weird or didn’t make any physical sense.

And then I took Intro to Imaginative Writing this semester. Basically every class had

some sort of group work, giving feedback on each others’ pieces, from 10+ pages to three

paragraphs, there was always something to talk about and workshop. I tried my best to

participate in every discussion we had, whether it was about a story we read or something we

wrote that I wanted to share with the whole class. I only missed three classes, and unfortunately

one was a workshop that I really didn’t want to miss but I was so sick. It was gross. We had three

workshops for our three overall units–poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction (the one I missed).

Poetry, I’ve always believed to be the devil. For as long as I can remember, I’ve always

had a hard time writing poetry that wasn’t so two dimensional. I longed to write poetry that had

layers you could peel back like an onion or an ogre but I just couldn’t. There was something
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about this class that really helped me to write poetry. We read a lot of poems and I think I was

able to piece together how the authors were able to do it, using their example and writing my

own. We also talked about different elements of poetry, and we always looked at examples of

different styles, voices and forms. My favorite form was the found poetry where we took pages

from books and crossed out words to make poems. For the workshop, I found it difficult to

provide feedback on my groupmates’ work, primarily because I’m not that good at writing

poetry so it almost felt like I wasn’t qualified to give feedback. And I was surprised to find that

my groupmates did indeed like my poetry and provided very helpful suggestions! Although I do

not see myself ever becoming a full, serious poet, I do believe I was able to write some really

effective poems. I was able to revise them with the feedback I got from the workshop, mainly

taking out words and replacing them with better sounding ones.

This was the first time I had ever written creative nonfiction, and I actually really liked it.

A lot of crazy things have happened in my life, and one day I might want to write a memoir. This

class definitely helped solidify that idea. For my workshop piece, I submitted the story of my rat

Pizza dying and how it caused me to become really anxious about my health. I was really

emotional while writing it, almost a little too emotional, and I left out some important parts. My

groupmates all picked up on that, and encouraged me to write about the important parts, like the

night Pizza actually died and not just the aftermath, not only to help me, but to also help the

reader understand where my pain was coming from. When I was giving feedback to my

groupmates, I think I held back a little only because everything was so personal, I didn’t want to

pick apart their writing and invalidate their feelings.

Although I was sick and missed the fiction workshop, I did submit a piece and still

received feedback on it. Fiction is my most favorite thing and I felt much more qualified to give
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better quality feedback on my groupmates’ stories. The story that I submitted is from a story I’ve

been developing since the beginning of quarantine and has been through many iterations. It was

not the strongest scene I’ve written for that story, but it was appropriate. I got a lot of feedback

that the time jump I included was very confusing, so for my revision, I took out the time jump. In

the grander story, I wrote a lot of time jumps, but for this one story/scene I understood how it

was seen as confusing and to leave it as a strong, stand alone scene, I deleted the time jump.

This class was the first time I’ve really gotten constructive criticism that I really took to

heart and believed would make my work better. It was incredibly refreshing and I am super

happy with the revisions I implemented based on the feedback I received. I learned that my

strengths lie in my characters and my dialogue, while I am a bit weaker in plot and setting. In the

future I hope to develop my plots and learn from my groupmates, all of whom were very talented

at describing settings, how to write fantastic scenes that really make you feel like you’re there.

My classmates were all incredibly talented individuals who I grew close with and wasn’t afraid

to share my work with. We all sought to strengthen each others’ works to make them the best

they could be. There was no negativity, it was simply positive and constructive criticism.

I feel like some of the strongest pieces I’ve ever written were the pieces I wrote for this

class. From my poetry to my mythulu story, I truly honed in on my skills and did my absolute

best to create wonderful stories. This class also taught me how to find inspiration in every little

thing, in every person, in every situation. This class has taught me how to take my pain, my joy,

my sorrow, and turn them into stories that can reach my audience’s hearts and truly make them

think.

And for that, I thank you for teaching me.