Creative writing is not a new experience for me as I write poetry and short stories on a regular basis, although I have not written any plays. I am inspired by all forms of expression through writing, even as diverse as journalistic pieces, and desire to familiarize myself with as many forms of writing as I can. However, I do not expect the Creative Writing One unit to take on board all these various forms of writing into such a brief twelve-week workshop. I am very confident in my poetic abilities, but very self-conscious concerning my abilities to write short stories, and I aim to improve my skills as a writer and also to acquire confidence in myself within the duration of the course.
Writing in Freud’s ‘free association’ writing is the strangest experience of creative writing I have had, as I am unaccustomed to delivering my thoughts directly unto paper randomly as ideas flow into my head. I usually prefer to think in a logical way and structure my ideas before undertaking a writing exercise, and so automatic writing, which is a spontaneous flow of writing, is a new discipline unfamiliar to me. I consider it to be a product of my subconscious mind, very much like a dream, in which a part of my thoughts are expressed for the first time in an unrestrained, incoherent form. Automatic writing is not restricted to the conventions of reasonable thinking whereby patterns of thought must be comprehensive, and in effect means that the author (in this case myself) is not in control of the direction or format of sequences that the writing piece takes. I am fascinated by my own attempt at automatic writing (see figure six) because it reveals a part of myself I did not know existed: a deeper, speculative side that surfaces from the subconscious, either as a dream sequence or a finished product of automatic writing. Whenever I write a story, I feel empowered like a literary God, and my stories are my creations. I feel that as a writer, I have...