I enjoy creative writing.

I am a poet and I enjoy reading poetry. I will not put any of my
poetry on this web page because I do not want anyone to steal it. I do
not have any official copyrights on my writing but it is still my
writing. One of my goals for life is to publish my poetry in an anthology
and one day publish an anthology or two of just my own poetry. One day
schoolchildren will be able to read my poetry in school. People will be
able to take my books out from the library or buy them in the bookstore.

I hardly ever say "I wanna be a writer.", because I am one! I just haven't really been published. That's only temporary! Cause one day I will. I have been writing a book since I was 15 years old, and I am now twenty. It won't be a novel because I haven't really learned to limit and focus on a few characters, so my book (when I have finished it) may
actually turn out to be a collection of related short stories. Related in that some of the
characters in one story will know some of the characters in another. This will show how
it really is a "small world after all"; and that there are "six degrees of
separation"
between everyone of us. So the female who was kind of originally supposed to be the main
character of my book is now the person that in some way all the characters of all the
short stories are connected to, even if they don't realize it. They might go to school with her daughter or have a cousin who is married to someone she went to school with . No,
the world doesn't revolve around her!

The first time I can remember trying to write a book was when I was eight years old. The original ideas for every book I tried to write usually came from some book I had read
or maybe sometimes a TV show or movie. But it isn't plagiarism. (And how would I know
what that means when I was eight?) Cause I would always change things around and add my
own ideas. It's kind of like, other sources gave me an idea and then I expanded on it.

I took the Creative Writing: Fiction class
here at Temple in Spring 1999!

In this class, we are reading a book called The Norton
Anthology of Short Fiction edited by R.V. Cassill, Shorter Fifth Edition, copyright
1995. In this book, on page 912, I happened to
find some quotes by writers on writing. So here they are:

"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was
born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his
talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On
the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with
such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make
his talent important."

- James Baldwin

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired befire
the age of fifteen."

- Willa Cather

"I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write.
Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story."

- Isak Dinesen

"Read, read, read. Read everything--trash, classics, good and bad, and
see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and
studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good,
you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window."

- William Faulkner

"A book ought to be an icepick to break up the frozen sea within
us."

- Franz Kafka

"Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was,
too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at
all.

- Katherine Mansfield

"There is only one school of literature--that of talent."

- Vladimir Nabokov

"Beginning a book is unpleasant. I'm entirely uncertain about the
charcter and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I
have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how
to treat it, because that's finally everything. I type out beginnings and
they're awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the
breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of
a book, a magnet to draw everything to it--that's what I look for during
the first months of writing something new."

- Philip Roth

"We work in our own darkness a great deal with little real knowledge of what we are doing."

- John Steinbeck

"Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have
drive to lay an egg."

- John Updike

Take a look at a version of this
page "Creative
Writing" in Spanish.

Please e-mail me and tell me about your
favorite poets, and novelists or if you also want to be a writer one day. E-mail me at:
ecolli01@astro.ocis.temple.edu or at:angelwriter79@collegestudent.com.

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This page last updated on Tues. Jul. 13, 1999.