Meta-text: What this Cadet has Learned

The experience of taking this class has been as enchanting as it has been enlightening. During these two transforming weeks, my writing has evolved from fair to good, but I’m still working toward great. Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned include allowing myself permission to write “with the door closed” as King’s memoir taught so that I can evolve toward allowing myself to consider writing also with it open for an audience. My private struggle is the challenge of learning to write with the door closed and still not harshly judge it before it even has the chance to make it out of the door. Reading the King book helped me to learn to let go of that stronghold a bit.

Another important lesson I learned: avoid adverbs. This has been a huge revelation, as I had not realized what dead weight they are to a piece of writing. I’ve come to realize that they are excuses to avoid dialogue or use of stronger verbs and adjectives in my writing, and how much more effective it is to let other parts of speech and language devices carry me. It was interesting and challenging to learn to rely on these adverb-alternatives more.

This class helped me to meet a goal I came here hoping to achieve: narrowing down my writing focus. I’ve written decades of journal entries, but never knew how to authentically craft a real story from them, and certainly not a story that could have qualities worthy of publication. The result of not knowing how to narrow my focus was the feeling of an assembly-line mentality with my diary, frantic sometimes to capture every single day’s tiny detail. Ughhh, this makes writing exhausting!

This perception ultimately drove me to stop writing all together, using work and motherhood as the excuses. The lessons in this class taught me to give permission to myself to set writing boundaries; that it’s ok to focus on only a “snapshot” of my life, or of the day or moment, without having to cover the entire journey.

From this class I was reminded of the importance of minimizing, and that sometimes writing a simple sentence is the best choice.
First draft – 10% = second draft as King wrote…or something like that?

I know my writing muscles have strengthened simply because I've used them rigorously while I've been here, and my writing has benefitted from the most involved creative writing revisions I have ever made. Prior to this class, the only writing that I gave this much correction and attention to included cover letters for jobs; I would pour hours over those, but never gave my own creative writing this much necessary and worthwhile attention. I feel proud of not giving up on a piece of writing simply because it frustrated me and needed a million changes!

From this class I learned how to be a more effective writer – and I hope (I’ll let my reader be the judge) – a more entertaining and interesting one, too. It has indeed been a rare and wonderful experience to participate in both the Low Country Writing Project and to live in a barrack among the cadets at the Citadel! The memoir on that experience is next!