Self-Evaluation

Creative writing has always been my favorite activity in school. In elementary school, it was always a topic we would cover. As we got older though, the focus switched from creative writing to essays and research - all of the boring stuff, with an occasional creative assignment. That was disappointing to me. Not only was it because I enjoyed making up stories and characters and new worlds to write about, but because I was always given great praise as a creative writer. I can’t say that stopped with the essays. English was one of my best classes throughout my middle through high school career. I always missed creative writing though. When I got to Rutgers, I decided to double major in Theatre and Journalism & Media Studies. With those two, there’s a wide range of fields I’m interested in - one of them being screenwriting. Taking this class, I thought the primary focus would be how to manipulate and work with our blogs and various media outlets with the creative writing sprinkled in. I was pleasantly surprised when the focus was the opposite. I was even more pleasantly surprised when I was given the opportunity to write two assignments worth of scripts. Out of the two, I was able to make some really intense plotlines and get a feel for what a potential career in screenwriting might look and feel like. In the first script assignment, I wrote a scene during a wedding weekend and centers around a group of friends from high school. The first scene captures a conversation between two of those friends - one of whom is still close with the couple getting married (and is even the maid of honor) and the other was removed from the group during college due to issues with drug abuse and even domestic abuse to his ex, who is the present day bride. The second script was a partner project, and collaborating made it all the more exciting. Our script was set in a diner and starts as a daughter just told her pastor father that she is pregnant. I loved working on these two scripts, in fact it was homework that I actually wanted to do. Also, there was a lot that I learned in writing both of them. The central focus of both of these assignments was to avoid stating exactly what the conflict is - we had to slide around it. Doing so made the assignments a little more challenging, but it made reading the scripts back sound so much more natural. In real life, we don’t explicitly say what’s bothering us - the words are too scary to state aloud. They’re too pungent. With the father and daughter script for example, neither of them could actually say the word “abortion” because it was too strong and scary for either of them to face, but they both knew what they were talking about. In doing these assignments, I learned so much about writing and learned that screenwriting is an actual career I could potentially want to chase.