Why I abandoned my creative writing class 

To the people saying I'm being dumb because this was an introductory class - nope! This was a second year course. I expected this in first year and skipped it. I promise, a lot of the time, you will learn a lot more simply by consciously reading broadly or taking classes to study areas of literature. ~ Tim

reminds me of advice I heard that went "Good writers don't study writing, they study something else and write about it"

To be fair, writing an assignment badly as a joke is how the Dresden Files got started

I've always remembered how my creative writing classes forbid us from writing fantasy. Which is, of course, the only reason I was there

Same thing happened to me in a creative writing class. I speed wrote a piece of garbage to meet a deadline and the teacher used it on the overhead as an excellent example to follow. My jaw was on the floor.

I am literally in a script writing class, and I turn in a script. The feedback is, "I don't get it." I state what I want to portray, and the reply is, "That's just something you will need to figure out." ThAnK's, Professor.

I'm taking a quarter off of my Creative Writing degree right now to try to get published by myself. If I can make this work, I won't have to go back. Wish me luck!

Thankfully, my university actually took Creative Writing seriously. The first few classes had nothing to do with dialogue or paragraphs or any of that basic shit, no, our first ever class was on haiku. Throughout the whole year, we kept jumping between every single genre imaginable to determine where our individual strengths lie. This was, in later years, followed by genre-specific courses, and culminated in us having to do a year-long assignment that has us do a full research diary on a novel we would like to write. I chose to do historical fantasy set during the European witch hunts, so they had me reach out over the pond and interview a history professor who specified on that topic. I also dug up texts written during that time period and had to incorporate all that knowledge into the novel research process. What followed next was us receiving an extensive course in how to actually write and talk to agents to get the business side of publishing a novel going. At the same time, in the other class, we had to write a full-on screenplay and demonstrate our process throughout the various drafts. It was intense but I felt like I definitely got the money's worth.

I had a creative writing teacher who pretty much hated popular fiction, like god forbid you had a superhero universe and was in the class trying to make it better like I was.

Not everyone has the same experience. I loved my Master's degree on Creative Writing. I loved my lecturers and colleagues, and that is a major element in art degrees to exchange opinions and grow as an artist. I deepened my knowledge on most matters I already knew and we read a lot of fiction we loved. I definitely didn't discuss what is dialogue 🤣 but we discussed how to improve it according to setting, characters, etc. My advice for everyone who wants to get a writing degree is to really investigate the curriculum and the lecturers - know if it's the right fit.

The professor wanting to use your JOKE story as an example is probably a best lesson in irony that the class could ever teach you

My creative writing professor was the type to look you dead in the eye when you handed him a story and say "any publisher would throw this out after reading the first sentence." I don't consider myself a great writer by any stretch but that man brought me from being awful to being somewhat competent in a semester, and I wish I had been able to take more classes with him.

You figured it out a lot quicker than I did. After I got through 3 1/2 years in a Literature degree, I heard a professor mention some really interesting and deep concept that I would actually have trouble learning on my own. I replied, "Wow! When do I get to learn about that?" The reply: "While you're taking your masters degree". That was the moment that I asked myself why they had been teaching me basic concepts for four whole years, while at the same time I had been consuming as much material on my own as possible. I'm glad that I learned what I did in college, but I could've learned everything useful that they taught in a year. I've learned so much more on my own, and your channel has been part of that. Thanks for doing what you do.

It’s pretty normal for basic concepts to be covered early in any arts programs. You actually do have to assume not everyone knows anything and build all those foundational skills and information from scratch. It can be frustrating for more experienced students sometimes, but it’s ultimately true that you can never afford to assume what your students know or don’t know when you first start teaching them.

These stories make me grateful for my writing professor. She never treated us like we were stupid and was flexible with deadlines in order to let us be the best writters we could be. I miss her man

I don’t even have my degree yet and I’ve already got three books published. The only thing I even remember from my creative writing class was how much I hated pompous stories and poetry. Once, in class, my teacher asked me what the point of reading my story was because it was so uninspired and derivative that he felt he had read it hundreds of times already. He also said he thought genre fiction was a waste of time. I hated that class. I learned nothing useful.

As a soon-to-be college freshman who is really considering being a CW major, this both terrifies me and is very helpful

Your anecdote reminded me of when, in my sister’s AP English class, the assignment was to take a small piece of Shakespeare and rewrite it to be about something else. So she turned “to be or not to be” into “to protest or not to protest”, a piece all about how stupid the assignment was. And the teacher loved it 🤦‍♀️

I'm an engineering major who got into writing in large part because of Tim's videos. I started a discord server for aspiring writers at my university and naturally we got several creative writing majors. Now, I've never taken a single creative writing class in my life, I've learned entirely from either reading good books or watching videos on youtube. So I was rather confused when these creative writing majors would post their stuff and there'd be so many basic things wrong with it. And I couldn't help but wonder what they were being taught over in those classes. To be fair though, some of the creative writing majors were are actually quite good and I benefitted from their advice and feedback greatly. But still... it's college level classes...

I had a similar experience in college and quit when I realized that there was no degree that could open the doors I wanted or get me the opportunities I wanted. In the creative writing space you want a door open: you break it down yourself. You want an opportunity: you make one for yourself.

This was the most validating video I've seen in a long time. I was taking writing classes in college hoping I would finally learn something only for it to be things I found in tumblr posts in writing advice tags as a high schooler. And I felt so conceited whenever I wanted to vent about how frustrating it was that I wasn't learning anything. And people were like wow so you feel you're too smart for college? Maybe come back down to earth. And it's like no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the internet has taught me way more at no charge then something that's putting me thousands of dollars into debt.

I contemplated taking some Creative Writing degree courses but two three things stopped me: 1) Lack of time due to work. 2) Lack of funds and an aversion to taking on more student debt after finally paying off my original debt. 3) I started finding great videos like yours and realized that I could get a great education at a fraction of the cost.

I actually really enjoyed my creative writing class. There were professional guest lecturers, interesting writing prompts, an awesome weekly writing workshop amongst peers, and at the end of it I had a little portfolio of stuff I was proud to have written and one of them even got published!

Funny enough, I also had a creative writing class I was in and I also had these feelings. Mainly because the professor went “You cannot write about death”. Also, I got shocked because the creative writing class was more literary fiction based than speculative fiction based.

The other day at work we were passing the time by telling stories so when it came to be my turn I told the most cliche young adult story imaginable (if you’ve been in any literary community for like 5 hours you know what to expect, awkward girl who is a master of death, classifying people by abstract concepts, yada yada) I was told how riveting and in depth my story was.

I'm a CW major (sentence structure and etc isn't going to come out in the comments haha) and what's really helped me is that I was forced to do writers workshops and had to put my work out there and receive feedback. I also had to give feedback to my peers. This was something I wasn't going to do by myself because of my crippling anxiety lmao. Doing those workshops made me realize that I REALLY like them and it helped solidify that I would like to teach writing at my current university, but in order to do that I need to have a master's degree. (I'm not good at anything else so if it's not this then I'm effed LOL.) I've honestly learned A LOT about writing from my university and it has really challenged me. I'm currently in a screenwriting class and it's kicking my rear but my university (SNHU) and it's curriculum is pretty fantastic. AT THE SAME TIME. I've had a different experience, my "joke" work wasn't used as the prime example lol. But I'm also taking CW online. You are speaking a lot of truths here. I imagine a lot of universities have very poor CW curriculums. If you aren't looking to become a teacher (and maybe also an editor or copywriter but I imagine you'd just need an English degree) then (especially if you're American because college is expensive) skip the major. Watch RU-vid channels like this one, read a whole bunch, send your work to friends and then work yourself up to posting it on the internet and you'll be golden in no time. People like Brandon Sanderson have all of their lectures from their writers workshop posted on their channel, you do not need a CW degree in order to write great stories or become an author. Then again.... If you want to pursue a CW degree then do it! Don't let anyone or their opinions stop you if that's what you want to do. You could have a completely different experience and a CW major could do wonders for you!

i actually made the experience in 2nd grade, when my teachers where like "Write down 10 keywords and then write a story about them." And I just wanted to write. So they told me, I should follow the class, because the other kids are not as good in writing freely as I am. If you love writing your whole life, most school and classes won't teach you a lot. It tok Brandon Sanderson for me, to actually learn about good tools, that I now apply in my writing every day.

YES! Here's my experience. I was double Majoring in film and creative writing because I wanted to make films but also wanted to make good stories. My creative writing class was literally just us writing, reading our stories to the class, and then receiving criticism from classmates, which even though we did critiques in class, we still had to write them down and hand a copy to the teacher. I stopped taking classes for that major after that and eventually dropped it. Afterwards, I took screenwriting and there, we actually learned things like how to brainstorm, how to create a character backstory, story beats, etc. THIS IS what I was expecting to learn in creative writing and instead I learned more from my screenwriting classes.

Watching dozens of video essays has taught me all I know about storytelling. I’m now incredibly well-versed in story mechanics and how storytelling should work, and all without college

Definitely depends on the college, my dept had its pros and cons, but no professor was as knowledgeable and well thought out as you and your videos! Kept my heart hopeful in CW during my last college year during the pandemic 🥰

I feel your pain, Hello Future Me. I majored in creative writing at my state's flagship school. Every single creative writing class I took, they dismissed genre, insisted that short story and contemporary writing was the only way to go, and when I wrote something fun that "reminded people of Dexter" and got the rest of the class really excited, the professor was like, "This isn't a short story and genre fiction is not appropriate for collegiate writing." This was in my senior year. The worst 50k I've ever spent >.

The worst part is when you're in a small class and the professor has a preferred genre, and during constructive criticism you're the only one who didn't write in that genre and get the shortest review time😅

i took a writing course and they basically insisted that you couldn't write anything in a genre or style. "if you can't tell your story with two people in a room it's not worth writing" yeah i never went back to that class again

During my freshman year of High School, I took a year book class. The teacher for that class also did creative writing and both classes took place in the same room at the same time. So I ended up witnessing the creative class assignments. They were.... not good. The teacher didn't give them lessons or anything, just gave them prompts that they'd work on for 2 or 3 days and that was that! I was considering taking that class the next year until then!

You know what you're just right, just got into being a DM and I went about into in a more elaborate way and for the first time I saw how amazing creative writing can see, none of my classes ever taught me anything basic that I didn't already know, no professor or teacher gave me the motivation to write something I was invested in. I watched a few of your videos on world building and I gotta say I was hella impressed. The were very in depth and have opened my eyes to so many possibilities, I'm seeing the world through different lenses and I really appreciate you for making these video for free, I definitely gotta check out more of your videos but your analytical skills and organization tactics are just beautiful. Thank you very much

My English classes in high school literally killed my love for literature

I am in an MFA program (admittedly an online program aimed at returning students) and I can tell you that it doesn't seem to get better. They just expect higher quality in your creative works. I have discovered a lot about myself and my writing through the process, but my classes honestly aren't that much different between now and when I was in creative writing classes for undergrad. Fortunately, I went into this just wanting to push myself to complete something (and I hoped the threat of financial ruin might finally push me there), and I was transitioning to a new genre that I was hoping to explore. But, seriously, my first class in the program was literally "these are the basic elements of a story" and there has been at least one class that went in on "what is dialogue" as a two-week topic. Like, I had to submit a writing sample and be accepted to be in this program. Surely we're beyond the basics by now?

The place were I applied, had selection rounds where you came to the school and they did different tests in group format. The tests were absolutely absurd, very vague but at the same time also incredibly limiting. They expected you to write a great poem in 30mins, for example, even though that usually takes months of thinking and revision. The teachers also seemed disgusted that I was already actively writing fantasy novels. It was very clear that they only wanted people who had never written fiction before, and they wanted to teach them how to write ‘high class’ snobby contemporary literature aimed at middle aged adults. I was so horrified because I LOVED writing and did it every day, and I was sitting next to people who NEVER wrote but thought that the concept of being an author was kind of cool. Just... absurd.

In my creative writing class (ironically) my teacher told us that studying varied subjects would be more useful to us as writers. And I think that’s true in the sense that learning about history, psychology, this and that etc gives you a lot of subject matter to build off of, however it doesn’t really account for the technique part of the writing.

Thank you so much for making this. I love writing, but as a psychology major I don't get to take many writing classes. I finally got the chance to take a creative writing class, and I immediately dropped it after the first class. Most people are skeptical of my quick judgment, since I'm not a writing major. But I have a book shelf of writing books, a minor in education, and I specialize in the psychology of learning and teaching. The creative writing classes I've experienced (four total, some not in my university) have some of the worst pedagogy of all time. Don't mistake price for quality. RU-vid has the best writing lessons you will ever find (excluding some perennial books on writing).

I applaud you for your virtuous desires in creating this channel. My writing would've never evolved into what it is without your influence. So thank you.

I'm someone who had terrible grades for English class, I never thought I would vy writing a book but here I am. It helpes that my main hobbies can be centered around Story structure character design, and world building, explaining all my middle school hobbies of gaming, drawing, and fanfiction. And why I've been passionately working on this first book for over a year. (Admittedly while distracted)

There's absolutely classes of what me and other students I've talked to call "bullshitting". You learn very little and can easily get a perfectly okay (or excellent) grade in these classes without taking them seriously at all and by simply throwing BS at it.

I have a professional writing degree that not only taught me writing skills but also taught me how the publishing industry works (and got me published in professional publications as a freshman). It also connected me to a critique group that taught me more through hands-on experience than any class. I work as a professional editor now. Grateful for the quality of my degree, realizing that not every writing degree is that practical. Also very grateful for your videos, Tim! You're an excellent teacher and I've learned a lot from you as well. :)

I feel that. Personally I was lucky that the main thing my professor wanted us to take from the class was how to take criticism and how to deliver it to improve as writers. Which is a skill I think not enough writers have. So I was fortunate enough in that regard.

Basically, you created a section of your channel out of spite… add we thank you for it! 🙌🏻

A very similar situation happened with me in some of my engineering classes. We were tasked with building a simple robot to sort marbles. Nobody had a working machine by the due date. I programmed my group's to randomly, 15 minutes before presentation, and the professor kept it for the next semester's demonstration.

I dropped out and started mentoring people for the same exact reason! I taught everything we learned and more to the first student I edited for in that class. He told me, "you literally taught me the whole class in the first two weeks." And I realized I wasn't gonna continue when I could do it myself. I learned so much more on my own while editing and mentoring for other people.

We always need good teachers. Your Prof wasnt one. From one teacher to another :)

I'm considering dropping my Creative Writing degree right now.

I had the opposite experience. When I went to uni here in the UK, I was a mature student in my forties in a class with a lot of 18 year olds and they were all complaining that they weren't being taught the basics of writing. Meanwhile, the classes explored writing from the oral tradition, including having the last Drut'syla come in and tell Jewish folklore that had been passed down to her by her grandmother, to the writing and poetic traditions through plays by greek playwrights including Aeschylus. It explored the responsibility of authors to tell the truth by examining autobiographies that had been presented as truth, that were actually fictions. They went into experiementation in writing, using the book Lanark as one of many examples. I learned a great deal. And of course so much of university is self-directed learning, which a lot of the students didn't understand. They thought it should be like school and college where everything was guided. I loved learning there so much I'm returning to do my masters in a few weeks with the same lecturers, all of whom are published authors. I think it's the lecturers that make the programs and I'm really lucky that the lecturers I had, have a real passion for words, their origins, their uses, etc. Having said that, you are an excellent teacher. You have the ability to go much farther into subjects than a lecturer over 12 weeks and add to that, that the university has to approve the program and very few of them view creative writing as a valuable course because it seldom brings in money other than through course fees, whereas lecturers in other fields have to write papers to earn their permanent places on staff, or discoveries made or technology developed can bring in a lot of money for them. But this just shows how return is directly related to investment.

THANK YOU. This was the exact problem that led to me not completing my English degree. Rather, it was one of many problems that forced me to take a hiatus from school, but what you described is the reason I didn't go back to that program. The year that I first applied for university, a local school was offering a new, seemingly experimental program called "Professional Writing," or "PROW." It excited me, because it had everything I needed for the career I wanted. It promised classes where they would teach you about how to write with correct grammar, and when to stylistically choose NOT to use that grammar; classes about how the writing industry works, and how to contact agents and editors; classes that instructed you to write in various long and short formats that were not essays; etc. I mean, miracle of miracles, they had chosen to create a program that had real, legitimate value to job-seeking writers! ...Naturally, the school discontinued the program in the very semester that I applied for it. The school offered to let me study in the Bachelor of Communications Studies, which was... well, it turned out to be more of a cross-disciplinary program that was best suited for... probably the kinds of people who enjoy different aspects of marketing --- like graphic designers, videographers, and advertisers. And despite teaching some more hands-on skills than the Bachelor of Arts, the BCSC ("Bachelor of Communications Studies - Communications Major") was clearly not designed around strictly creative endeavours. I changed programs, at the suggestion of the Dean of the English Department; she sent me a letter saying that my professors had mentioned me, as someone who was doing unusually well in my English classes, especially for a first-year. Since I was more interested in writing than the cross-disciplinary stuff, I assumed an English major would serve me better. And it didn't. By the time I got to what should have been my final year of post-secondary, I'd gained a lot of my own experience teaching and creating curriculums, from things I did outside of school. Thus, by that point I could judge pretty well, and see that the Bachelor of Arts was structured in a way that could make students into academics, not professional writers. If you relied on the school as your sole source of learning, then you'd end up with a lot of knowledge about literature of the past, and virtually no knowledge about how to create literature for the future. Perfect, if you wanted to become a university professor; borderline useless, if you wanted to learn practical application. Although I did gain some technical skill from school --- in particular, the mechanics of writing, like grammar and style --- most of what I have learned about how to get better at writing, I have had to learn on my own time. I learned more about novel-writing from participating in National Novel Writing Month, and accidentally self-publishing my story draft (that's the result of a lot of weird and convoluted events), than I did from whole years of university classes. And I strongly remember my class about writing poetry (CRWR 393, or something), where the best poets in the class were better at the START of the semester, than the vast majority of the students were at the END of the semester. The people who were best at creative work had just gone ahead and started doing it in their own time, and learning through trial and error, rather than learning it from a program designed to create new professors and academics. I never went back to finish the final year of university, because I didn't think it was worth sinking further into debt, just so I could get a piece of paper that would qualify me to do soulless and corporate marketing campaigns, for companies that don't even understand what they are hiring writers to do. Anyway! I totally agree with these points, and I want to thank you, Tim, for providing these tutorials that you do. Sometimes when I try worldbuilding for stories --- especially more fantastical ones --- I get stuck on some element or another, and you provide some really helpful ideas, and questions to ask myself. (I've been meaning to rewatch the video about writing fictional empires. I should do that in the next couple days.) So, yeah. I stand with you in solidarity: university is not well-equipped to help teach creative writing. There's no shame in trying to learn the writing craft through other ways. And I thank you for sharing your expertise; when I see the kind of writing that even a lot of big-budget productions contain, it comforts me just a little bit to think that someday, EVENTUALLY, we may get another generation of writers who have honed their skills and learned to write well. I hope you lead a lot of new writers down that path. Keep up the good work, eh. (Me, I'm going to stop writing and take a nap, before my cold medicine REALLY starts taking effect.)

Two of my biggest passions are writing and music. I'm glad I decided to go the music route in college. I learned so much and got to know so many great musicians. I don't think I would have had nearly the same experience in writing class. Although I do miss writing and want to get back into it.

The best creative writing class I took in college was screenwriting. We only met once a week, but my professor taught us everything we needed to know about genre, assigning character roles, and formatting. And we had small peer groups that gave detailed and useful critiques on our screenplays. I feel like my other CW teachers didn't want to bother with reading long stories so they focused more on mimicking writing styles over developing craft.

I definitely understand your point and it is 100% valid. That being said, I came from a HS that wasn't devastatingly low income per say, however there were A LOT of old teachers and not a lot of learning materials. And the problem with old teachers is that many of them are extremely jaded. Unfortunately, I had to come across a lot of English writing classes where the teachers were most likely going to give you a printed worksheet and leave you to figure it out. The one year I *did* have a young, non-jaded teacher, I was dealing with the mental instability that comes with being 16. I wasn't really making sure that I paid attention to my classes. Perhaps there are people at that age who do study this stuff in their spare time, and I admire them for their dedication to their craft at such a delicate age. However despite being such a worldwide ability, the common person might live their entire life without refining that skill. I was a sport kid when I was a teen, imagine my surprise when I realized that not everyone is as persistent in the basic athleticism of their bodies as I was. Not everyone knew that you have to control and pace your breath when running, not everyone knew that bad posture when running can significantly slow you down, not everyone could jog at a steady pace for a long period of time, not everyone could maintain their balance when standing on one leg. "But it's so basic! It's so EASY!" Yeah, because I've been practicing it since I was 7 and studying sports books to get better. Not everyone was looking to push their physical limits at that age; some kids might have been writing and learning about the hero's journey instead. The blame, if I had to assign any, would be on the Universities for not making clear the level on the class description. To specify who exactly the class is catered to. Like you mentioned in your pinned comment, I certainly don't expect that sort of talking down in a SECOND YEAR Creative Writing Class. That's just stupid. Obviously if the students taking the class have been through the basics, why make them relearn it again in the later years of their education?! Just continue where you left them off and it doesn't waste anybody's time and money.

I recently finished (2022) a BA in Creative Writing, despite already having a book traditionally published. The reason was, a lot of agents and trad publishers I was submitting to expected you to have a qualification, so I decided to just get the degree (it was my 3rd undergrad degree - no biggie). Some of the first semester subjects made me think it was catering for non-English speakers, but I did have fun writing a novella for 3rd year. Since completing the degree, I've had 3 more books traditionally published. So, while not a brilliant degree, it did help me in the end.

You're videos are genuinely the best way to learn about writing!

Ok as a teacher I 100% understand this and I promise all teachers get how you feel, it sucks and is crap because most of the best students do already know the basics and more because they enjoy this stuff so learn outside of lessons in their free time and just need guidance on concepts that are difficult to understand without baseline knowledge - but we have to accommodate for the lowest level, who should have learnt that at 16 (though frankly I think those should’ve been learnt much earlier), but many haven’t, and with a set list of things you need students to learn to pass the course, have to plan lessons around making sure the lowest level of student will scrape a pass, which often leads higher level students to be left to their own devices. And yes, this happens even in second and third years. For example, I’ve had many second year students who couldn’t work out percentages when given all the necessary info (with calculators). This meant massive amounts of time were spent going over these basic concepts. I will say, this also reflects poorly on any tutor, who should be able to pick out stronger students and set them appropriate tasks - somewhat forgivable if they’re new but not if experienced Note: this isn’t to bash students who struggle with these concepts, everyone has their own baggage and history that means they are at what ever level they are. This is more a about how classes are poorly mixed with vastly varying ability students being put in the same lessons

That’s amazing! Not gonna lie I’ve just discovered your channel and I have made more notes and had more ‘aha’ moments than all of my other classes combined so thank you for doing what you do! 😁🙏🏼❤️

And I'm glad u and Sanderson did make it free cuz my writing would still be at an eighth-grader level who's still obsessed with making a Lotr wannabe. But luckily for me, not only did all of your lessons help me improve as a writer, but also gave me the tools necessary to help my dad, who wants to write books now that he's in retirement, to actually write them well. But its also good to find other things you are good at too, as a backup and fail safe. For me, I'm also fairly good with computers and I currently have a job as a Software Engineer (which college helped me immensely to get). But I still do plan and am writing to improve so that one day I can release my own Magnum Opus when I feel it's as best as it can get.

I feel like it's a blessing in disguise that I'm, for some reason, not allowed to take creative writing at my university without being an English major. I have a feeling I'd experience something very similar as you did. What I've done instead - major in something that still interests me, just a bit less, that's more marketable to employers, and then in my spare time, practice writing, go to the university writing club, and hope that someday a writing career may take off. Yeah, I'm sure I won't get there as fast as a do or die approach to becoming an author, but I feel for most people, this will bring more stability and peace of mind.

Went to uni for my first year in writing (also from nz), left after the first year. I had so much more fun in other courses papers, and I learnt way more from reading stuff online and watching your videos in like 2 months than I did that entire year at uni.

My university degree for Creative Writing went really really well because we were the very first year to do that uni's course. We started in late 2019 and we had a lot of free reign to explore a lot of stuff in the first two years of the course. When the other two years came, who didn't really have as much variety in it, things became a little less fun, but being there at the start was definitely the thing that made it really beneficial for us

Seems like I actually had a pretty good CW class. I took it because I needed some more credits for a full time semester, and I knew it would get me to do some writing. I actually learned a few things about how to think about this. You'd be surprised how many short story perspectives the class had on "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water." From a village's right of passage, to a desperate attempt to save a father during a drought, to a romantic comedy where Jill the city girl goes on a date with an annoying eccentric outdoorsman named Jack.

Makes me think about the school I'm currently in. It's supposed to teach you how to be a film director. The problem is that the only casting and actor direction class there is in the entire 2 years degree was a single day in the second half of the second year by someone who only directed documentaries in his career. Which means he never had to do any casting nor any direction. I won't try to put into words how mad I was.

Honestly, imma say thank you to whichever class you took on the fact it prompted you either directly or indirectly to start your channel, because SO many tips and phrases you explain have stuck with my writing. I just wanna say thanks for getting me back into writing :D

I took a creative writing course and I find that I hated the course, my professor told us we could only write stories about certain topics and they had to be based in the real world, no fantasy or sci if

Sometimes it all comes down to having good teachers, and there's almost no hint to know if your teachers are interested in creative writing as much as you. The education system doesn't enforce good lesson topics either, let alone know what a good writing curiculum looks like. I'm glad that I was in a class with a teacher and classmates that are actually passionate for writing, because I would have learned nothing if we all just followed the prescribed lesson plans. This teacher even recommended some writers to review my first book for me, so I can't be more grateful to him.

This is my experience with the arts as a subject in school, as a whole. School's in a weird growth spurt right now. It's a system designed for strictly grading people for a menial, factory workplace, trying to hurriedly shift into teaching co-operation and creative thinking. The arts are just shoehorned into this, and as a result you get creativity which is by all means subjective, being graded and tested with the same strictness as a science test where there are only right and wrong answers.

I’m glad you did. I have learned a lot from you and really appreciate your insights 😁

I was astounded to learn graduate art students didn't know what perspective is in a picture. That's so simple it should be taught in primary school.

I appreciate this as someone who is starting to take my writing more seriously and wants to get published but feels like I'm starting from behind because I studied something else in college. Good to know I didn't miss much, really.

For me my creative writing modules of my English degree gave me a chance to get feedback from a published author. I think that's pretty invaluable, as I see better my strength and weakness - hard to get that kinda feedback elsewhere in my life. Also due to adhd having to follow a course helps me stay on track. That said channels like this a great sources of help too :)

This is exactly why I would very much prefer teaching myself the craft, and just get a degree in something else. There's pros and cons to everything, teaching yourself included, but i just feel like I would learn the things I need to learn and study other aspects of storytelling that interest me that you ether have to wait until another semester for or just barely cover at all. And all with the added displeasure of having to pay money for it, stress over grades, or counting on the professor to hopefully be the type of person that actually gives a crap about the craft of storytelling and knows what they're talking about. But when teaching myself I get to learn at my own pace, my own time, and study what I want to study. And your On Writing videos are a major help with that, Tim! :)

To this day your videos have taught more then 8 years of classes. I am literally on the cusp of finishing my first book thanks to your videos and the help that have given me in understanding and formatting my own work.

I didn't leave, but I was very discouraged when the unit coordinator (who also was head of the English department at my uni) not only said in her lectures that she didn't like fantasy/scifi (which is what I wrote) but also that noone ever failed that unit. Not to mention when she told us about how she nearly burned down her house in a fit of creative angst or how I was the only one in my entire tutorial group who noticed that one student had plagiarised the Matrix

I honestly sat through my creative writing course, hoping to hone my skills in understanding how to write character arcs better, instead, as you put it, we get a glorified 1-3 hour sessions covering the bare-bone basics on themes and proes. A literal lesson I sat through during my high school english class.

most of my creative writing subjects have had a heavy emphasis on 1) reading or watching and then analysing examples and 2) workshopping and getting feedback, which i really enjoy! this sort of thing sounds much less pleasant.

Oof. Big mood. My undergrad had a fiction-writing workshop class that I was super excited to take, but spots were limited, and so you had to actually apply for the class and submit writing samples. - sophomore year: rejected - junior year: rejected - senior year: rejected After that last rejection, I heard from a friend who got in that the professor has serious disdain for sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction, and basically rejects them as soon as he reads something outside everyday modern life. To be "fair": While I love speculative fiction for the world-building and all the new opportunities it creates, I do recognize that a balance must be maintained - exploring those new opportunities to the detriment of the opportunities every artist has doesn't do the genre any favors. As such, a writer of speculative fiction requires *additional help* beyond the core scope of the class.

It’s funny I love learning how to be writer and learning the writing process but I have no wish to become one myself. I’m also subscribed to savage books, closer look, and the tale foundry because I love learning how the different creative writing process works. But if I were and was taking a creative writing class (that I was paying for) to teach me the most basic stuff then I would definitely be upset.😂

I’m not studying writing in college, but I had a bunch of problems like these in highschool, which I think should be pretty normal lol First day in freshman year, I was solely responsible for our writing teacher limiting the amount of pages we could write in all assignments. All because I made a short story in mind-boggling two pages and a half, what a monster I am 😱 Another teacher called me to a corner to lecture me about acceptance after reading a text of mine, saying it was homophobic. I’m gay. It was a scene of a man lovingly describing his lover. For some reason he thought the text was sarcastic lol When I changed schools, we were assigned to give ratings and commentary to each other’s texts. The boy assigned to me wrote a five-page argumentative text repeating the same point over and over and the teacher told me I was wrong for giving him a low score, because “repeating your point is a very effective way of convincing people”. Maybe it’s because of crap like that people need basic classes in college… but it doesn’t help if said basic classes are as bad as highschool classes.

Writing is a big passion of mine but I went into majoring comp sci instead because I hated taking writing classes in middle and high school. I still had to take a WR course as a degree requirement, and it proved to me that I made the right choice of major.

I took a creative writing class where I was once penalized because my professor apparently couldn’t grasp the concept of two people who are friendly with each other using nicknames

Such a buuuurn. Love it! ❤️

I’ve taught creative writing from time to time at the college level. Exercises like writing a Hero’s journey are perfectly fine for beginners, though I question the utility of prescribing any particular genre or structure for students. But the professor was clearly not doing a good job with managing different skill levels in the classroom. I tend to let my more experienced writers kind of do their own thing with my periodic guidance and input and in workshops, I often turn to them to help less experienced students as more elder statesmen. But that’s partly because in the course I teach, there are inevitably many skill levels. CW instructing isn’t all bad. But this seemed like a bad example. And ultimately, the fundamental problem with CW degree programs is that CW instructing inevitably has diminishing returns compared to what people can learn for free through reading, writing, the internet, and writing groups.

Yeah, your stuff is great. Brandon Sanderson has years of his college creative writing class on RU-vid for free. Those are great. Trope Talks, and a few other content creators have a pretty amazing amount of material I wish had been available in my younger days.

Thank you so much for sharing your passion with us ^^ I have always loved writing and dreamed of becoming a writer but for some reason I thought I lacked writing techniques and it seemed unachievable for me. Your videos gave me hope i could improve and give it a try.

Yeah, even at the community college level it's pretty bad. I wrote a fairly complex, layered dystopic short story, and then got back feedback like "I had trouble following the plot" when that was the surface-level, most explicitly-spelled-out thing on the planet, and then proceeded to completely mischaracterize the main character and the metatextual purpose of the story's existence within the confines of the story itself (The framing is a final letter written from the protagonist to explain why he likely is going to be dead by the time she reads it) going so far as to say the main character is "fishing for martyrdom." I'm pretty salty about it, yeah. Like, haven't been back to class since, and I still heavily question if I want to go back at all. Like, how does someone so thoroughly misunderstand a story and not only claim to be a professor and author to boot, but also a fan of the very genre I wrote? Like, what? If I do go back, he's getting the most cookie-cutter shit out of me from this point on.

Damn, hearing this really makes me Value my own creative writing degree. At least they respect us enough to teach us somewhat challenging techniques half the time, like dialect and atmosphere. If I was asked to write something “following the Hero’s journey,” I think I might’ve canned my degree as-well

Throughout my time in school I waffled between computer science and creative writing, because those were my 2 biggest passions. I wound up in computer science because my writing teachers would constantly preach about how their assignments couldn't be done the night before the deadline and still pass. Of course, that's exactly what I did, and lots of my work was used as examples of what you can do when you 'start early and work hard'. Anything a teacher asked for I could do, easily. But when I sit down to write for me, with no one to answer to but myself, I can't do it. Nothing I do is ever good enough for ME. I dont even know what what 'good enough' looks like in my own writing, I don't know how to define it. That's why I went with computer science. I know what 'good enough' is there. When the program works within specifications then I know I can stop. When it comes to writing creatively, I have never learned when I can call it done.

Thats a general issue with many education systems in my experience. There always are people getting degrees not so attain the knowledge from the classes, but to get a piece of paper to confirm they have said knowledge. As getting a job it often doesn't matter if you have the know-how or not, but here (switzerland) you need the degree, otherwise employers won't care.

This is why I’m focusing more on improving my technical skill with visual arts like animation, so that I can instead rely sources like you for tips for story telling.

I'm actually so glad my current creative writing course isn't like this. The teacher actually respects us and knows that we already know that stuff because he knows that we're all already *writers.* (Why would we be taking a writing course if we weren't?) So instead of going over basics of writing, he briefly reviews them and then gives us examples on how we can change and twist them to fit our own writing style.

I quit mine too, but the worst part is, the professor didn't even teach us anything. And that's not an exaggeration, she literally expected us, the students, to teach each other....somehow. like I was really excited for the class because I was really interested in learning how to write short stories, but.......I wasn't learning anything, and none of my classmates knew anything either so they couldn't teach me. No joke, it was the same caliber as my high-school creative writing club....which also didn't have anyone who knew anything on the topic so I drew anime and cartoon characters on the chalkboard the whole time.

100%. I have a major in creative writing, which was the biggest waste of time and money ever. Worse, it ruined my book. The novel I wrote and published, I'm glad I made it, but there was always something that bugged me about it. It is only now I realise that a compromise I made with my vision at the behest of the class I showed it to damaged the fundamental idea and point of the story that I was never able to fix.

That's why I went into a history major. I can use the knowledge in my work, and I have a useful degree to help me make cash while my writing takes off.

I had a writing class on college last year where the professor just made us consume media that he liked and teach us that we had to write by using tropes as a guide. Then he made us choose a videogame that we liked and no matter what we picked, we had to write about how it follows the hero's journey and also look for types of shots for some reason (as if it was a film).

I knew someone who did a CW major, and they came out of it feeling as though it was one of the most valueless things they'd done. As a birthday present, I sent them every single book reccomendation I'd ever gotten on writing - things like Story, Hero of a Thousand Faces, etc. - and he dilligently chugged through every one of them, and after he was done he told me that he learned far more from those books than his entire 3 years at uni. If you're in a CW course, consider maybe doing this instead, and maybe going for like an English Literature or History major instead.

I feel this right now. I'm in two classes right now for a creative writing degree, and I love one of them. I've gotten a lot of great feedback on my writing in it and learned some specific techniques I wasn't aware of. The other class however is exactly as this video describes.

So, _you_ started a RU-vid channel because you wanted to make a free version of your degree, Philosophy Tube started because she wanted to make a free version of her degree, how many more disciplines have had someone do the same thing?