I have learned that writing, in this semester of creative writing, can be many different things. We went over a variety of different types of writing. Some of the writing we went over I liked, and some I didn’t. The exercises we did every morning in class helped me get ideas and inspired me to write some things for my writer’s notebook. Writing is a subjective thing, and can be interpreted many different ways with many different types of people in the world. No two pieces of literature are exactly the same and that in itself is something to be respected.
	My writing has strengths and weaknesses of sorts. A strength I see in my writing is my ability to describe scenery and places. I could say that I am pretty talented at drawing out scenes with descriptions of sight, smell, and texture. An example that I really like is my short story I turned in, titled “Trap Door”, which was originally an exercise that I took and made a story. A weakness I see is that I move too fast in the story. I don’t take the time to explain what a character is thinking, planning, or remembering in a story. My stories’ paces are always swift, to the point, and closes without questioning. That is another weakness – my closings always leave a majority of questions answered, but what makes a story best is a closing that leaves more for the reader to wonder about.
	I have been writing since the second grade, and I can still remember the title of my first story I wrote. It was called something like “A Day on A Plane” which was a story I wrote about me flying on a plane for the first time. Since then my writing has changed a lot and I can say that my writing has changed even more so through the duration of this class. My first entry in my writer’s journal is about my name. Its writing is sloppy and gives no information – I can tell I was half asleep while writing this. Since then my stories are richer in detail, information, story, and ideas… but I still write exercises when I am half asleep most of the time. My writing has improved a lot since I had first started, and a lot since I had started this class, but I still don’t consider it great or worthy of any mention.
	In my opinion, I haven’t put much effort into this class. Two of my projects I handed in as a major grade were finished up before school. During the duration of this class, most of the time I am dozing off and did not try my best on most of the exercises. If I could go back, and retry the class, I might have tried harder on my journal writings. My opinions about things and the way I think change substantially every day so I really can’t give you a truthful response to my own statement. I do like having a big collection of writing I did myself, even if half of it is impractical.
	My opinion of poetry is that it is a style of writing I can not grasp. I need things described more in depth for me and stories behind each character, and any important object in context. Poetry just doesn’t do that and it leaves me thinking of it an unfinished story. I still despise reading and writing it. Oddly enough I have read a poetry book that I remember taking a liking to. Its title was something like, I could be wrong, “Love That Dog”. I bought that book in fourth or fifth grade at a school book fair. It is written in the format of a student’s writing journal for poetry and how his lookout of poetry changes over time. His first entry is something like this: “I don’t want to write poetry because boys don’t write poetry, girls do”. I can tell why I liked this one though – it is because its in a format of a story and it goes along a line of events, abstracting from most other poems.
	The real reason I chose to put the poems I did in my poetry collection is really miserable. They were the only poems I had written. I only wrote 8 poems, just enough for the poetry collection and none more. They weren’t planned either I just wrote them all in about six minutes. The writing shows that too. Planning my writing out is something I dread to do. Even this essay is just me writing it as I think it. Overall I enjoyed the free work opinionating of this class and liked the slow pace.