When most people think about college rigor and competition, the STEM majors are what come to the minds of most, but they shouldn’t be. The humanities are just as competitive, but I’m going to be talking about creative writing specifically.
I’m an English major, but I’m also a creative writing minor. However, it took me a bit to get to where I am today. When I was applying to colleges as a senior, I applied as a psychology major, but when decisions came out, I didn’t really get anywhere that I wanted to commit myself for four years. So, I went to community college.
My first year of community college, I was a psychology major, but during that year, I was going through a lot of self-doubt about psychology and really wanted to change my major to English. Over the quarantine period, I was able to refind my love of reading and writing, and attending community college, it gave me the confidence that I needed to pursue a career in books and writing. So, that is what I did. At the end of my first year of community college, I was an English major.
It wasn’t until I got to Berkeley that I was able to declare a creative writing minor and became more able to pursue writing.
I’ve been seriously writing for a little over two years now (this year being the third) and I’ve grown to learn about how competitive it actually is. Being a writer means being able to put your truest and hardest work for people to judge and comment on. It means rejection on rejection.
Being at Berkeley, I’ve had the opportunity to take creative writing workshop classes, but it also means I’ve had the opportunity to apply for them. Berkeley offers creative writing workshops, which consist of a professor and 15 students, where we write and read each others’ writing, talking about what’s good and what could be improved upon. They are highly competitive and hard to get into.
Depending on the professor and the class, the applications differ from one another, and 50-100 students apply vying for one of the 15 spots.
The first time I applied was last semester, spring 2024. I applied for two short fiction workshops and I got rejected from both, but that didn’t mean I gave up. When I applied for the workshops this semester, I applied to all of them: two short fiction, two verse, and one long narrative. When decisions came out, I got rejected from both of the verse workshops (which wasn’t that much of a surprise), waitlisted in both of the short fiction workshops and admitted into the long narrative workshop.
I was excited and happy, despite only getting into the long narrative class. Out of all the ones that I applied to, long narrative was the one that really wanted to get into. However, the day before classes started, I received an email saying that I was off the waitlist for one of the short fiction workshops. This started a lot of contemplating on whether or not I wanted to take two creative writing workshops in one semester, but after a mid-life crisis or two, I decided to take the plunge and take both.
The thing about creative workshops is to have people you don’t know (but you will learn to know) reading your work, but they aren’t just reading it, they are close reading. They nit-pick the small things, ask questions you wouldn’t have asked yourself, and give constructive criticism and suggestions to make it better. Not only that, but they are reading what is on the page, they don’t know the things that you know, so I’ve found myself in times where they are wondering about certain parts of the story that I knew in my mind, but wasn’t written on the page as clearly.
While the workshops are competitive, there is so much more where the competition continues. Every time you submit something in the hopes of being published is a competition (they can’t publish everything they receive), but while it is a competition, your mindset and mentality are the most important.
Yes, everything is a competition, but if you continuously think of it like that, first, it isn’t effective, but secondly, it is also toxic at times. Writing is a sport, it takes time and dedication to grow. I’ve experienced praise and constructive criticism, but I’ve also experienced comments that are less than constructive.
It is important to remember that reading is subjective and because it is subjective, not everyone is going to like it, but it doesn’t mean nobody will. Honestly, it was hard for me at first to deal with being workshopped and getting constructive criticism, because I don’t want to be told my writing is nothing less than perfect. However, when I look back to my earlier writings, I see how much I’ve improved and it makes me excited for the future to see how I’ll get better over time.
Here’s my advice: if you want to write, write. Continue writing like nobody is watching…or reading, because if you can’t do it for yourself, who are you doing it for?