Improving as a Writer

Recently, I posted about experimenting with genre, which was inspired by the poetry portfolio I completed for my creative writing class.

Today, I got that portfolio back with a...

GRADE.


Yes, that is bold, italicized, and underlined. As a scholarship student who needs to keep an A- average to remain a scholarship student, as well as a recovering perfectionist, that is how I view grades. I will not say what that grade was, but that it was one grade point (counting grade points as C-, C, C+ etc.)  lower than I expected. Yes, one whole grade point. If my grade had been the first comment I saw, well, I would not be calm enough to write a blog post right now (and on a writing blog, no less! I would have felt even more unqualified to write this post than I am, and trust me, I'm far from qualified.)

But my professor, bless her, left a comment on the top of the first page that caught my eye before the grade did. She said that my work is getting stronger and stronger.

And then I saw my grade, and was ok with it. Happy, even. To clarify, though I expected to do better on the project than I did, I did not expect to get an A, either. The best lesson I've learned since becoming active in the YA community is how many more lessons I still need to learn. And, though I'm not new to creative writing, I am new to poetry, so of course I wasn't going to master the style in a few weeks.

But I got better. And I think I'm getting better as a YA writer, too. That's not to say that every scene I write is an improvement on the last one I wrote (and that was not the case with my poetry, either), but that, generally speaking, I'm a better writer than I was a few months ago. And I think that's all I can ask for.

What about you? Do you see how much you've improved as writer? Can you recognize and remember that, even if you take a step backwards? Let me know in the comments!

Experimenting with Genre

It's been three weeks since I've updated this blog because:

• Midterm season, which included a research paper, an analytical paper, a portfolio for creative writing, rehearsals for my Shakespeare performance project, and actual midterms, tried to kick my butt. I fought it the best I could, which meant I neglected this blog, neglected revisions, and neglected sleep.
• Uh, I watch a lot of television.

Really, it boils down to busyness and laziness which, when combined, are productivity's biggest enemy.

As mentioned, one of the assignments I had was a portfolio for my creative writing class. We've had weekly writing assignments all semester, and the portfolio was a way to put all of them into a revised, polished package. After triple-checking to make sure it was correctly, frantically searching for all the peer-editing sheets I had to include as appendices in the black hole that is my backpack, and an epic battle with my stapler (that, for the record, my stapler won), I passed mine in Monday morning. And I felt good about what I passed in, which I didn't expect to because it was poetry portfolio.

Now, I adore poetry. I love to read it, and it was all I wrote in, uh, elementary school. Beyond what's been required for school, I haven't written poetry since then and, needless to say, the poem I wrote at seven in which I likened the bathroom to prison wasn't exactly a masterpiece (though it's infamous in my family.) So, I was worried that everything I wrote would be terrible, I'd fail the class, and my professor who is also an editor would tell all of her publishing friends to put me on their blacklists. Naturally. 

I have no idea if my portfolio will come back with an A or an F on it (yes, I only think in those two extremes), but, as I said, I felt good about it. That's because I experienced the same rush writing and revising some of the pieces that I do when I write and revise my novel (which is a far cry from poetry.) Admittedly, two of the poems that happened with had strong narrative elements to them (one was a prose-poem, and the other was a glosa), but they were still quite different from a YA novel due to length and other genre conventions. And, two of the poems I loved to write didn't have stories behind them at all. Ultimately, I wrote pieces I never would have written otherwise--pieces I never thought I could write--that I was happy with, and that was really, really cool (I know, I'm so poetic now.)

I took a break from novel revisions to focus on this project (and to, you know, pass my midterms), but I know that all the work I did for my portfolio will ultimately help me with my current novel and any future novels I write. The best gift this class has given me is the courage to experiment. Maybe I'll write more poetry, maybe I'll try a paranormal, maybe I'll attempt a dystopian. Maybe I'll experiment more within the contemporary genre. Maybe I'll enjoy it and maybe I won't. Maybe it'll work and maybe it won't. 

I think I'd like to find out.

What genre do you write? Have you written in other genres? If so, what was your experience like? If not, would you like to try? Let me know in the comments!