creativity unlocked

The new semester stated a while back. I didn't care too much; I don't have to take classes or teach them. I see by the throngs of freshers crowding the hallways at Imperial and the sofas in the Library Café that the quiet of summer is over, but I could have guessed as much from the turning leaves, misty mornings and early nights.

For me, the new semester presented a dilemma. For nearly two years, I've attended evening classes teaching Arabic. I've made some progress, more than I would have considered possible, but precious little from a practical point of view. I know how to read and write, I recognize the odd cultural phrase, and I can surprise native speakers with a judiciously placed greeting or inquire of well-being, but I can't hold conversations, follow shows on the radio or read newspapers.

Would I waste more time on this and buy into another year of confusion and illumination in equal measure? My sister thought it would be a good idea. She told me she was very excited about our forthcoming trip to Syria, traveling the periphery of the country with possible excursion into Lebanon and, the epitome of off-the-beaten-path, Iraq, and that I should keep studying to help us get around safely. I didn't know anything of this trip – certainly I wasn't involved in any planning and in any case, knowledge of the language would probably be the least worry on it.

I signed up for creative writing instead, payed my dues and waited for the module to start. The overeager neophytes had already dispersed into confined lab spaces and coffee shops when the evening classes were kicked off, and I was starting my twelve-day residency in Colorado. I missed the first two sessions, but then, last week, the time had finally come. I stepped inside another unknown classroom for something that I couldn't explain or define. I didn't even know what to expect.

Creative writing. What does that mean? Is the emphasis on writing? Is it on creativity? Will the class teach technical aspects and skills, or will the focus be on exploring possibilities and discovering new horizons? Can creative writing be taught at all? Enough academic programs exist to give the impression that it's possible but skeptics remain unconvinced.

I walked in, late, rushed, and exhausted after a long day. I hadn't had lunch and hadn't even had time to grab a coffee and a muffin from the Library Café that sits halfway between Biochemistry and the Humanities, a precious location but the staff are slower than my usual progress through a blog post, and a line of prospective caffeinators, always coils through the atrium. I was fatigued and brainwarm when I took my seat.

The class was no workshop. There was a teacher and he was in control, flipping through the slides of his presentation with conviction and obsessively name-dropping literary terms, cultural movements and artistic icons of an earlier time. Do you know this? Does that ring a bell with you? Expressive, gesticulating, enthusiastic and slightly mad, his demeanor was a perfect match for his appearance: On his head, over a trimly cropped lawn of stubby hair, exploded a bewilderment of Rasta dreads. Later, when we got down to doing some work, he turned out to be pathologically positive and one-hundred-percent encouraging, and possibly a good teacher, though that's still too early to say.

The teacher is a self-proclaimed Surrealists, though that needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Dalí once remarked that the only difference between him and the Surrealists was that he was a surrealist. I love Dalí and I take his word for unshakable truth on this subject. No one else was able to show the beauty in madness quite as stunningly.

Let's say the teacher uses surrealism as a tool (which is to ignore that he also write surrealist poetry) to remove us students from the reality that we tend to cling to when writing. Creative writing is often fiction, and to get a hang of fiction it's crucial to let go of our experiences, of what we see and read daily. Fiction starts in the head, and is always new. Surrealism might just be a good first steps towards fiction.

We were asked to just write without much thinking and certainly without breaks, shooting for strange juxtapositions, warped images and metaphors that don't gel, the things I tend to avoid when writing because I want my writing to make sense. I guess what I took home from that first class is that writing doesn't always have to make sense. If it sounds good, if it has rhythm and color, the reader is likely to accept it.

Nonsense might make sense to the reader who's exposed to it and who tends to interpret, give meaning and see depth in incongruities, all because if the writer wrote it, there must have been a reason. After the reader has taken the first step of starting to read, it's more difficult to abandon the piece and admit defeat than to continue and try to cut through the contradictions and clashes. By reading, the reader accepts a certain authority in the author and is likely, at least initially, to blame any lack of understanding or feeling of elusiveness on himself and not the writer. I know that I read like this. Now I just have to learn how to write like this, too.