Doing an FYP on local literature has made me realise how much I miss creative writing. When I was Sec 2, I took a creative writing elective for Lit class (the other electives were film studies and theatre) and although it sounded like the nerdiest and most boring elective out of them all, it sparked my interest in the English Language 🙂 and not to mention I was given free liberty to write in pretentious, superfluous sentences to satisfy my ego. This was the only class I looked forward to each week.
My first assignment was to write about the life of any object. I chose my favourite stuffed toy – a Winnie the Pooh puppet whom I have affectionately nicknamed Wenny. (Please tell me I’m not the only person who names her stuffed toys…) I wrote about Wenny’s journey from its time of manufacture to its shipping to Tokyo Disneyland to how I eventually came to buy it. There were several assignments after that but this is the one I can vividly recall. I only tried my hand at prose; poetry has always struck me as a niche area meant solely for people who have had deep life experiences.
Despite my apparent fondness for Literature, I never went on to take it as an O level subject because I was worried it would kill my love for reading, especially with intense text analyses and all. I have this hypothesis that when you start doing things you love in great detail, you start to lose interest in them. This is why I prefer to keep my hobbies separate from my pragmatic pursuits. Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to prove this hypothesis so let’s just leave it at that.
Surprisingly enough, I don’t miss creative writing. What I miss, however, are the wildly imaginative thought processes that the mind is abuzz with each time a fresh storyline manifests itself. Most of the time the creativity fizzes out, but for the rare times it lingers, those are the moments worth holding on to.
Pickledpumpkins 