Creative Writting Club

Thursday, September 24 – Today was the first meeting of the Creative Writing Club for this school year. This year the club is under new management as Mr. Arcenas will now be leading the group. Many more people have joined this year than last year and we are eager to start reading people’s work. I am now the oldest Creative Writing Club member and therefore I have been asked to help Mr. Arcenas with the club this year. During the meeting today we went around and introduced ourselves and talked about what kind of works we like to write. I talked about the poems and short suspense stories I had done in the previous years and how much I enjoyed writing. Then we discussed what the focus of the club would be this year and we decided that each of us should bring in a work we have done and we would have the other members of the club read it and make critical comments about it, good or bad. We would do one work every week, per meeting.

Thursday, October 1 – Today was the first day of actual work in the Creative Writing Club. Because this was first time it was decided that Mr. Arcenas would provide the first submission of literature so that we could have some practice before we did one from a student. He gave us an interesting work about a commander’s experiences in a war in Bosnia and how it affected and scared him. The piece was very confused and very potent but after reading it through a few times I felt I had a good understanding of it. We went around the room to each member of the club and made comments about what we thought of the story. For our first meeting I thought we did very well and I felt that everyone had very intelligent comments to make about the story.

Thursday, October 8 – Today in the Creative Writing Club Mr. Arcenas again provided us with something to read because no one in club remembered to submit any work for the week. He gave us a selection of different phrases from different authors and asked us to consider what the authors were trying to say. The most interesting one he gave us was by Ernest Hemingway which read, “Baby shoes for sale: Never worn.” We went around the room to each person and considered what this phrase meant. Many members said it had a lot of importance and was an extremely intelligent work and maybe even the best work he had ever written. I said that I felt people were reading into it too much and that while it was certainly very clever it was not really a masterpiece but rather it was a representation of the power of words in literature and how so little can say so much.

Thursday, October 15 – Today in the Creative Writing Club we read one of my own works that I had been working on for a few years now. The name of the piece is “Company” and it is a short suspense story that I was hoping to submit to the Literary Journal this year. I had submitted this piece before in Creative Writing in the past year but I wanted feedback from a different group of people this time. Everyone read my piece and discussed it among themselves. They said that they all really enjoyed the story and thought it was very clever and appreciated some of the literary aspects I used within the piece. They then told me that perhaps I should consider changing my wording in some places where it did not flow as well as the rest of the poem and where some of the words used did not seem to fit with the style writing I had in the rest of the story. They also mentioned that I should consider finding something else to replace my use of onamonapea because it is always very tricky to make that literary feature work in a story because it is so awkward. I felt I learned a lot from having them read and comment on my story and I knew that I would be able to apply their advice to my work and greatly improve my writing skills.