On Writing Creatively

I took a creative writing workshop class last semester. Being one of my first college courses period, it was definitely an interesting experience. Aside from reading short stories from a variety of authors and comparing their storytelling methods (which we usually decided were outdated and "worked for the time"), we graded and talked about each of the four stories we wrote in that class. Hashing out minor details pertaining to consistency, continuity, and flow, as well as learning to balance exposition with narrative, was actually the best part about that class. My nervous tick kicked in whenever it was my turn to read my story out loud (which meant my voice and hands were both shaking), but I enjoyed getting to comment on the works of others. It felt like a had a role in shaping the fiction of others, which is something people rarely get to do. Sure, most of the stories weren't great, but I still like a lot of the discussions the authors had about their work.

But the class did make me realize something important, something that I should probably keep in mind going forward: I'm an awful novelist. This isn't a self-hating statement meant to show my modesty; I just realized that most of the stories and worlds I think up don't really work within a completely literary model. I hate detailing every last bit of information about a character's clothes, mannerism, and attitude. I'd rather let visual cues do that for me. Maybe I'm just too lazy to flesh out characters in that way, but I found that I like to skip most details and get to story points.

That's probably influenced by the fact that when I read books, I tend to ignore specific details about a character and just make up my own look based on what I know about them. So I'm wont to have the reader do the same in whatever fiction it is I'm writing, or just use the explicit nature of a screen to my advantage.

Maybe that's why I've stopped reading novels, for the most part. House of Leaves was the last real novel I've read all the way through, and I've leaned more towards argumentative works in recent years. Also, anyone who's read House of Leaves will tell you that it doesn't focus on detailing the environment or characters in extreme detail.

I know that there are probably thousands of novels that would cater to my sensibilities nowadays, but Ulysses is the only one that I've mustered up any interest in. Sounds heretical, I know, but when it comes to fiction, I suppose I'm the kind of person who'd rather see what something looks like than be told about it. Besides, when I read a novel, Edward Norton is usually the main character anyway.