Writing for the sake of writing

I love to write. It's fun, it's therapeutic, it lets me escape my own life and live vicariously through someone else, and it lets me sort out my problems on the page. When I write, I get to play God; things happen the way I say they should happen, the way I want them to happen.

Writing is escapism at its finest — it's better than reading because you get to choose where the story goes, instead of being at the mercy of the author. Nonfiction is just as good; it's why people keep journals. Writing lets us take a step back from our lives and look at it from a different perspective. It lets us see the way things could have gone, the way they should have gone, and it lets you step outside of the experience enough that you can see the way it really did go, which is not necessarily the way you see it in our heads. And better yet, you can change it. In "Everything is Illuminated," Jonathan Safran Foer '99 writes that "in writing we have second chances," unlike in life. Creative writing professor Joyce Carol Oates similarly reasons that "the advantage of writing over living is self-evident: Writing can be revised, living cannot." The delete button may be the single greatest invention of all time. I can erase and rewrite and reshape anything I put on the page. A story becomes a living thing, constantly changing, shifting, developing into something new and different. I imagine this is one of the reasons people have children — it's amazing to watch something you created develop — and a story can't talk back to you.

Now that school has started, however, the idea of doing more writing than is required by my classes seems absurd. After pulling an all-nighter to write an essay, the last thing I want to do is sit down and write a story. Luckily, I take creative writing, which means that when I blow off my anthro reading to write a story, I get to justify it as productive, instead of calling it procrastination. Naturally, it's my favorite class, and this is my third semester of it. But I almost didn't get to take it. You have to apply for creative writing, and I got wait-listed last fall. I got lucky and ended up getting off the wait-list, but the close call still haunts me.

I don't take issue with the fact that you have to apply for creative writing. The quality of the writers is part of the reason why the workshops are all really interesting and educational. At the same time, telling people who want to write that they can't seems like a disservice. It sends the message that you should only bother doing something if you're good at it. There is definitely something to that when it comes to writing, since stories are written to be read. But I would argue that the joy of writing has less to do with the brilliance of the words on the page and more to do with the process of writing itself. For all the reasons mentioned above, I find something wonderful about writing just for the sake of writing.

So while I don't think they should get rid of the application process for creative writing, I think the University should offer another creative writing class that anyone can take. It wouldn't necessarily be the best creative writing class ever, but it would give people who wanted to write a place to do it. The more you write, the better you get, and there's no better way to learn about writing than to workshop your own and other people's work. People shouldn't be prevented from writing if they love it just because there are other people who are better at it than they are. Creative writing is the best class I've taken at Princeton so far, and I think anyone who wants to should be able to have that same experience.

Alexis Levinson is a sophomore from Los Angeles, Calif. She can be reached at arlevins@princeton.edu.