Pressure

I have to write a short story for my creative writing class. Easy, right? For someone who loves to write, and loves writing short stories, this should be a piece of cake... right?

WRONG!

It is much harder than I anticipated, and while procrastinating actually writing the story, I have analyzed why I am having such difficulty.

Pressure. Creative writing is something that I have only ever done for the fun of it. I mean, there were occassional assignments, but it wasn't like they really had to be good. Besides, for much of my highschool life, kids in my class didn't like writing or English, so I had a pretty good feeling that my work would be one of the better things turned in. Now that it is college, and several students in my class are English majors, and seniors no less, the pressure is much greater.

What makes the pressure even worse is that we have just spend the past month and a half talking about creative writing, and how to improve our writing, and I have realized oh-how-many mistakes I make in my writing. Plethoras. That's how many. So now instead of just allowing myself to write, I get all weird and second guess myself. For instance, you may have noticed my use of the cliche "piece of cake." That is unnacceptable!! We are supposed to think of fresh metaphors and expressions. Like if I said, "Writing this short story should be a walk in the park." Wait... that's already taken. Hmm. "Easy as pie?" Nope. That one is taken too. Why are there so many cliches about something easy?

At any rate, now that there is pressure, I feel completely stuck. I've started FOUR different short stories, gotten about a page and a half, abandoned them as crap, and moved on. And now what do I have? Four false starts but nothing concrete. Nothing I can turn in to impress my teacher and classmates.

I don't want to turn a story in to my less-than-tactful teacher and have it come back with CRAP written over it in red marker. (Notice that "crap" is all caps, bolded, and italicized.) And I don't want to go in and have to read my story outloud to random students! The fact that I know the story will be read out loud makes it ten times harder. Ugh.

Wish me luck. I'm gonna need it.