The Writing Center’s Creative Writing group has been in the works for a couple of months. Dr. Scott Chiu, Cal Lu Writing Center Director, as well as my first semester ENGL-110 professor, first proposed the idea to me on what must’ve been some odd Tuesday in February. As someone whose life essentially revolves around writing, I was thrilled at the idea of being brought into the Writing Center to create something new.
The process of creating this group fell into place along the past semester. I’d gone through it along with fellow Writing Center consultants, Israel and Jesus. Israel, had his own plan of creating an TESOL group, and similarly, Jesus, another first-year, was establishing a group for Spanish Writing.
The three of us, with the help of supervisors Scott and Jess, went along creating goals and rubrics of how the meetings should play out. Straight away, we went into marketing it out to the rest of campus!
And so the day has finally come: we’d received an email from Andrea, a graduate Psychology student with an interest in creative writing. We’d set up a meeting and got started on our work.
We began our meetings with simple introductions, in which we learned more about each other. It was great getting to know Andrea and how she felt about writing. It turns out that along with her studies in psychology, she is highly interested in writing. With that, it was even more interesting learning that she wanted to apply her psychology studies into her story.
This was understood once we spent some time working on plots and structures; all 3 of us were able to hear each other out on our individual stories. I felt like it was interesting hearing how both Scott and Andrea perceived the world, and why exactly they wanted to put those feelings through words on paper.
The meeting eventually ended, and Andrea left. But what I saw in this meeting almost goes as deep as the human experience as a whole. It was a telling scenario of the impact of writing. A bit stretched perhaps, but true nonetheless. Andrea’s story was rooted in a dream she’d had, which was further analyzed. She plans to tell this story through metaphors and ultimately use it as a means of creating a bigger picture. Scott’s carried the same sort of ethos; he wanted to write stories that he’d been compiling through his life in order to create this sort of memoir.
Writing can be seen as a way of collecting and recounting; whether it’s a dream, or life well-lived. Sometimes, these things can’t stay put in the mind; sometimes they’re unable to stand alone and be what they are. Sometimes these things are an art form: something to be expressed and put out into the world. I’d realized that this was the point of being a writer: to put life into colorful words; to put pains and perception into prose. To tell a story universally in a way thats best represented, whether metaphorically or explicitly. Writing is life, and just through this group meeting, I am glad to have realized it.