Craig Conroy Assignment 0

Be warned, I felt like being a little melodramatic when I was writing this.


To begin with, I am here to study English. I have, for the most part, taken only literature classes, saving any creative writing classes until now. My love of writing is inspired mostly by artistic impulses. I believe that writing is one of the most profound mediums we have stumbled upon to date. I write for the response. I write with the grandest of aspirations; I want to topple cities with my words, I want to raze civilizations. I want to change the world in ways no other person could. This may seem silly and misguided, or I may come across as part sociopath, but honestly, I am just trying to get the most out of what I can do, for good or bad.
I grew up just south of Boston with one brother, one sister, and two parents divorced for some years now. Living there is a strange experience for me. I have moved a few times in recent memory, twice in high school, and most of my friends live at least a few towns away, but for now it still feels like home.
The real love of my life is acting. I would say that ninety percent of what I write is originally imagined as a performance and that everything I write is better read aloud. At least I think so. Most of my other hobbies and interests are marriages between writing and acting.
As far as my reaction to feedback on my work is concerned, I am open to critique. Writing is a personal endeavor. When you present your work to another person you want to change them in ways they could not have imagined previously. You want to make them laugh, cry, soil themselves; anything to help your work survive. Sometimes, and most times in fact, that is not the case. So I take criticism and I work harder on perfecting my style because I want to be, like everyone else, the best. I won’t hide my desire to be the best I can be, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to strive to be your ultimate self. Most of the feedback I can remember is negative. Not, “your work is a travesty,” negative, but suggestions for my improvement. A lot of it was focused on my sentence length because, especially in stories, I sometimes like to amuse myself by creating long, winding sentences.
My favorite work of all time is Miltion’s Paradise Lost. I read it when I was thirteen, before I had ever really considered writing to be anything more than an exercise in word count control. I’m sure you’ve all had that moment where you read something and it just pops. Paradise Lost was what writing should be. It was sublime. It had none of the incessant brevity of the modern era. Beautifully crafted sentences, many lines long, were its strength not its weakness. For me, this was the only example of what writing could and should be. Good writing should be beautiful no matter what the subject matter. Good writing inspires people, and that’s why I am taking this class. Because I want to be inspired.