Education

I graduated with an accounting degree a few years past (let’s not count) and my favorite class was creative writing.

In my final semester I only needed to complete three classes to graduate, which meant I needed three more credit hours to maintain status as a full-time student or I’d have to start repaying those student loans. Having dabbled for years in writing short stories, I determined to take a creative writing class. I hadn’t darkened the doors of the English department since my freshman year.

It was a drastically different experience than anything I took in the business college. There students sat in rows for lectures, really didn’t talk to each other, and everything felt like a competition. In contrast, the writing class was in a small room with shelves and books, part library, part classroom, with a large table in the middle where all 15 or so of us sat around the perimeter and all took part in discussions.

We studied classic short stories and talked about them. We wrote our own stories and read them out loud to the group. We partnered up with others to critique and offer suggestions on writing. It was all very interactive and different. I remember getting an A in the class and I also recall how surprised everyone was, including the instructor, that someone from the business school could write. It was fun and I’m glad I had the chance to take it.

Did I have to take that class in order to write? Of course not. Writing carries no educational requirements. In fact, I’d bet most of the successful writers in history didn’t have a degree in writing. Did the class help? Yes, I have great memories of it although I couldn’t tell you anything specific I learned. It was more of an education in how to interact with other writers and learning that people do things differently, which is just fine. By that, I mean that people respond differently to the same prompts, like being given a topic and having to write a five-page story about it. Learning there are no guardrails in writing was probably the best education I got on my way to that accounting degree.