This topic came to mind from a scholarship my parents wanted me to apply for in school. It would have been fine to do if it were summer and I didn’t have anything to do, but to be honest, it had way too many requirements for me to try to pull together at the end of the semester, but the thing that really got me was that the prompt question was, “What inspired you to get into communications?” or something along those lines and so I told my parents, “Hey! I’m an English major. What I want to do has nothing to do with communications.” And they told me it’s English, it has to do with it. It’s all the same.
Naturally, I went to ponder that and so I asked myself in majoring in English, what was my goal? That was easy. To do something related to writing, eventually becoming an editor or maybe an agent, and even though there’s a degree of communications in that, I realized my primary goal in all that was to tell a good story and find them. If their good stories, I don’t care if the reader gets a message or understands some underlying theme. That’s fine if they do, but I want them to enjoy the story.
Ultimately, I decided not to do it. But it got me to wondering the difference between the three types of writing above. So I decided, while creative writing can be informative and have a goal of communicating a message, not all creative writing has to do that. Sure there’s usually a themes running through it, but if the theme isn’t prominent, it’s not informative. So that means my YA fantasy novel may have themes of accepting responsibilities, sacrificing for the greater good, and facing your own insecurities for the sake of the security of others, but I don’t care if you get that out of it or not. I just want you to enjoy the story. On the other hand, a story written by Charles Chestnut in the eighteen hundred called The Wife of His Youth is clearly trying to get a message across about color lines and social prejudices although you may enjoy it along the way.
The difference between those two stories is that one is using creative writing to inform and communicate a message while the other's primary focus is purely for entertainment. So in the end, I asked myself, at any point do I care whether or not I’m getting some message or theme across in my novels? No. I don’t; therefore, I could have never written an honest 700-1200 word essay on why I’m interested in communications, because it doesn’t interest me.
I thought it made a good post because people like to dump writers all into one category. People think because I write, I can write anything. But the truth is that I can’t. I dib and dab, but there are many forms of writing and have my strengths and weaknesses for different types, just like all fields do. I mean, Lebron James, Tiger Woods, and Michael Vick are all athletes, but you don’t see them trying to play each other’s sport. It’s the same principal in writing.
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