This is why I wasn't always good in the various creative writing classes I've taken. My teacher would give us a warm-up prompt with a time limit on it, and I was never sure what degree of success I would have with it. Depending on the prompt, I would either be wildly victorious and be confident enough to read my creation out loud to the class, or I would sit there, staring at the words, questions or photograph or whatever it was that was on the board, determinedly trying to think of something innovative. I would ultimately end up scribbling down something mediocre near the end of the allotted time, often times crossing it out later because of how atrociously impossible it was to expound upon. I was generally relieved to receive assignments, because that meant that instead of having to pounce on a subject and furiously and frenziedly produce a piece, I could have time to write, and hope that the aforementioned wave of inspiration would hit me at some point before my work was due. Sometimes it would, sometimes it wouldn't, but usually if it was a prose-based assignment, I could crank out something moderately above-average if I really set my mind to it.
It's interesting, because when I was younger, I never used to write prose. I've always had an affinity for writing; when I was really little, I used to keep a diary. It was purple, argyle-patterned leather, with Pocahontas and her raccoon friend on the front. I started writing in it pretty much as soon as I could write, and kept it solidly until I was about 12 years old. At that point, the entries became few and far between, sometimes stretching over a whole year before I would write something new. Once I was a teen, I started unintentionally accumulating stacks of notebooks, most of them relating to school in some way, in which I would write short, rhyming poems. They mostly consisted of simple a, b, a, b schemes, or sometimes a, b, c, b or whatever. If I was feeling particularly adventurous I would meddle with other rhyme schemes, but all of my poems always rhymed. I didn't dabble in prose too much at that point. I was like, 14, and I was primarily writing about boys and other such topics, and what better way to do it than nursery rhyme style? It wasn't until I got older and really interested in reading that I decided I wanted to try writing short stories and other prose pieces. Before that though, in my rhyme phase, it was easy for me to just sit down and write about anything. As I've gotten older, I've grown out of the poems and have discovered that it's much easier for me to write prose most of the time. When the wave hits, however, I still like to compose poems if the mood allows me to. It's an interesting switch, but I guess it probably says something about my life or my personal growth and development or something. I've grown out of the fantastical nursery rhymes and grown into more realistic compositions. I'll always be a bit of a dreamer though.
