Creative Writing

Hey! I neglected to mention that, on wednesday, I started school again. And I'm taking a creative writing class this semester!
So, here's the phenomena. I like to draw, but I've never enjoyed taking art classes. Hopefully that won't be the case for a writing class. But some of my teachers from humanities have recommended it, and I'd really like to give it a try.
So, I'll write about that as it happens. Considering this blog is supposed to be about writing, but so much stuff here is not about writing.
We have 2 textbooks.
A Garden of Forking Paths by Beth Anstandig and Eric Killough.
Steering the Craft by Ursula Le Guin.

It looks like "Forking Paths" is writing samples, and "Steering the Craft" is a lot of writing exercises. We did one of them in class today. It corresponded to the first exercise in the book. It was about the sound of your writing. Sort of the childish way of writing where you include lots of sound effects.
What first popped into my head as I read about this was the Ponyo theme song (the Japanese one, not the bad english one). See, Japanese uses lots of sound effects. Lots and lots of them. You get them in manga, though most of them are untranslated, so I don't know what most of them mean, let alone the characters for them. And the Ponyo song used lots of them.
Maybe that could be a project for Ellen. Cough cough. To write out some of the Ponyo sound effects and their translations. And other sound effects too! We could start using them in America and start a trend! Wahahah! Although I think Ellen, Crystal, and Stephanie are the only ones reading any of this. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, however. Anyone else out there?
So, today's exercise was to write a short piece using sound - not rhyme or meter, but other sound devices like onomatopoeia or alliteration, ex.
And I drew my inspiration from Ponyo. First of all in the movie, I liked the sound Ponyo's feet made when she was barefoot. And in the song, there were sound effects for feet.
So I went with a barefoot theme.
I'll type it out for ya.

Sllipslapslipslap, bare feet slapping cement,
Little ones skip-slipping along.
Tomp-tump-tomp, feet stomping on dirt,
Puffs of dust fluffing around browned toes.
Slipslap, tomp tump, running back and forth
Laughing, learning, ringing running,
Fun under wide blue skies.

Yah.
They're meant to be read aloud. Some of us did read ours.
There are examples in the book too.

Here's a couple more short exercises. Last week we started the class by making a 5-word phrase to describe ourselves.
I remember one from our class, I think.
Live wire in a stagnant pool.
Something like that. I can't remember any of the others. -_-'
Mine was
"I hope to touch the world."
Not only traveling (though that would be awesome) but I'd like to write something that can touch people all over. Make people happy, and get them to think.

And we're also supposed to keep a sort of journal. In it, we write anything we notice with our 5 senses, and they gotta be between 10 and 13 syllables. 5 per week.
It gets you noticing your surroundings, and condensing descriptions. I'll find an example eventually.

Here's sad commentary. You think you've written something really good, and then you read it aloud to the class and realize that it sounds kind of pathetic. Sigh.

Obviously, you should not take my blog as a substitute for an actual class considering I don't seem to have a clue what I'm writing about, but I'll continue to write down fun exercises and whatever else I learn.