Dear Professor,
I am currently in the midst of a writerly crisis and therefore am having a hard time gauging how far I’ve come in your class this semester, as you requested for this assignment. I will attempt to answer your questions to the best of my ability, although I realize that most of my responses will likely be the ramblings of a panicked student who’s fallen into a spiral of self-doubt. Hopefully, my answers help illuminate where I stand in my ongoing writing process.
What did you accomplish or learn this semester?
Over the past few months, I discovered what I believe creative nonfiction is meant for. We share stories to connect with humanity, and as I have been taught, essays need to be a “full” story. This entails the protagonist undergoing a change that readers are welcome to observe. I still believe this is true, as it has been confirmed by the best writers out there. But I also think there is a place for stories that are just moments, the blips that make up our lives, being told for others.
We want our characters to overcome, to expand, and we’re supposed to read the work of others with that intention in mind. But sometimes I don’t want to feel changed while reading an essay, and essays specifically. I read books to see change and feel changed, but sometimes I just want a short piece about small events, ideas, and threads, milked and overanalyzed till there’s no shred of essence left to be understood. Can’t there be a place for both kinds of stories?
Overall, I’ve learned that I’m picky about what I read and write, and at times I wish I could forgo the rules I’ve spent my adolescent years learning. It seems like ignoring certain rules is occasionally necessary for the birth of brilliance.
What do you see as areas of attention for skills you would like to improve?
I’d like to try writing in a different form, anything other than prose, because it scares me.. I’ve grown too comfortable with prose; we know too much about each other at this point.
I’ve noticed that the reader is in my head during my whole writing process. I’m always wondering how I can better appeal to them. Is that a good or bad thing? How can I know it’s something I should fix if I don’t know what’s right?
This semester reinforced my aversion to failure, which often overthrows my attempts to try anything new. Maybe that is why I don’t know if I can be a good writer—however one defines a “good writer”—because I hate to fail. Odds are, I’ll be bad at everything if I hate to fail. I just
feel like a baby on the precipice of the rest of her career, throwing a tantrum because she can’t do things the way she wants to.
What would you like to accomplish next? What are your short-term goals? What are your long-term goals?
I’ll be taking one of your advanced classes next semester and graduating in the spring. Fair warning, I will likely recycle the same stories I wrote this semester as I think they might have potential after some redrafting. Hopefully, these works will build up to a collection of essays about my family. But if I write about my family, then I can’t publish anything about my family because they will eventually read it. So, who knows?
I’ll probably go to grad school and travel. I will hopefully publish my first book before I turn thirty. I don’t see the use in planning everything out. Life has its own ideas for me, I’m sure.
Why do you write?
My mom says that I didn’t choose to write, but that writing chose me. By her logic, some energetic force in the sky was shelling out talents to us little people down here, and when it came to me, that thing threw my talent down its throat, rolled it between its cheeks, and then spat it back out at me.
I write because I have no choice. I can’t live with all this noise in my head, so it either comes out of my mouth or out of my hand and onto a page. Oftentimes writing is smarter as it allows less opportunity for me to sound like an idiot. I write because people say it’s what I’m good at. I write because everything else seemed to be taken. I write because it has been the greatest love of my life and the biggest shit storm ever created.
Thank you for your guidance this semester, Professor. I’m (mostly) proud of the work I’ve done in your class, yet I fear I will never be completely satisfied with anything I write. Any advice you can provide would be much appreciated. I will try not to spiral too much over the holidays.
Sincerely,
Your student,
Caraline
Originally from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Caraline Shaheen is currently living in Boston and working towards her BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, class of 2026. Her work has been published in HYW’s 2025 Digital Magazine and the London Writers’ Salon’s “Writer’s Hour Magazine.”
Featured image by Mike Tinnian on Unsplash.
