Creative Writing?

This summer I am doing the EXPLO camp program at Yale. It is an interesting experience and I’ve met some cool people from all over the world. To be specific, I made good friends with people from Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Denmark, Oman, Chile and Guatemala to name a few, as well as all over the United States. It is an interesting experience, and I don’t really have anything better to do with my time, except read, write and freak out about college. There are classes with no grades but most of the teachers are damn cool. As I work on an essay on the state of culture now, I would like to publish most of the fruits of period 1 class, Creative Writing 120B. The class was taught by a 20 year-old college student from England via Oregon; let’s call her Gabby. And she’s a smart cookie, having been deferred from Stanford University, and was damn cool, not a nerd like me. The class overall was good, but I wish we had been able to finish more of the ideas we started. There was about fifteen hours of class time, and we experiment with techniques for beginning prose fiction and poetry. I came away having produced three haikus (don’t get jealous, I’m not trying to steal your thunder) and a short story, which I am publishing below. I did not take the haiku exercise seriously, just something to enjoy.


Global Warming

Ice melts into sea;
The water levels rising.
What are we to do?

Seismic Poem

Violently Earth Shakes
People Running Wildly
Oh those damn fault lines!

Screw You Haiku

I don’t like haikus
It is so hard to write them
Stupid, pointless scheme



The Anxiety of Influence

By Brian Hillman


In my former and more productive years, I discovered something that has been deeply distressing me for some time. William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in world history; hands down, no buts about it. He is the apex of literature, with unmatched elegance and creative powers. I am not William Shakespeare.

I am a writer. My name and corpus of works are of little significance now. I have written many a novel, article, story, poem-anything and everything. My works have graced the tops of best-seller lists the world over. But that means nothing.

It all started when I discovered Henry James. I had read the Miltons, Tolstoys, and Heines before, but I did not put much thought into them, and it was before I began having some decent success as a writer myself. Then I found Henry James; titan of the novel, writer extraordinaire. And then it hit me- Henry James was a superior writer than me. There was no getting around it. In the pecking order of great literature, in the pantheon of greatness, James’ works dwarf mine. Then I couldn’t escape him. Whenever I wrote, he could be watching me, judging me. I was forever competing against him, and I would always come in second. That’s when my career as a writer came to an end; sometimes I wish the tragic muse had killed me right then and there.

After James I discovered other greats. All I did was read the masters; Keats, Vergil, Fitzgerald and Hardy; Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner and Sophocles. The more I read the less I wrote.

Writing soon became a nightmarish interrogation. Whenever I wrote I could feel Austen and Joyce and Sartre looking at me and laughing. They were ever present spirits, perpetually over my shoulder, getting a sick comedic pleasure out of my inferiority. Every character I ever created, ever plot I ever formulated, every moral I tried to relate was trumped effortlessly by the Gods who were hovering above me, stalking me as I tried to work and get them out of my mind. I tried going to other venues to write. Unfortunately, they followed me wherever I went; to the coffee shop (Ovid loved cappuccino, and he once spilled it on my head!); to the park and especially to the library. So I went back to my study. My Ivy League diplomas were meaningless those ruthless souls- I could not escape them, try as I might.

So I barely wrote anything else. My publisher was furious with me, but I had a clause that allowed me to get out of the two novels left on my contract, granted I never published anything. Needless to say, there were no problems complying with the terms. Writing had become the last thing I wanted to do.

But it was a struggle. I felt compelled to write. I want to go back to the days of oblivion and naivety. Before Kafka, Wharton and Vonnegut. Yet that is impossible. I have eaten the forbidden fruit of greatness, and now I am aware of myself.

The time has come. I have written books, read books, sold books. I have outsold Dante, Yeats and Aristophanes, but I cannot measure up to their enormity.

I must end this struggle. I am done with writing- I quit; I’ve had enough. The fight had been too much to deal with. Am I a writer, or am I not? The answer- I was a writer and I am no longer. Now, as my hands have a date with a power tool, my happy dagger, end with this- scribere vivereque perire est.