Hello friends. Today I would like to share with you my creative writing journey. I think that I have published some blog posts regarding how much I missed blogging but I never thought about the whole picture — how my soul craved creative writing. I am by no means an expert on creative writing. I don’t even know if I’m that good at it but my whole life I adopted creative writing as one of my identities. As the book Atomic Habits says, you have to identify yourself as what you want to be and not just set goals towards them. So instead of saying “I’d like to write creatively more”, practice saying “I am a creative writer”. Hitting the identity part of yourself and not just the results-driven part.
Since I was a kid, I remember being fascinated by books, poetry, and essays. I remember enjoying the English subject so much. It has always been my favorite subject in school. I loved writing essays, haiku, short stories, and the like. There’s this power that words can hold. How a single word can make a whole sentence better. How you can express yourself in so many ways, each direction taking you to a whole different feel of the piece. That fascinated me so much and it still does. Weird but how can a person be in love with words so much? Anyway, I remember being excited about picking topics, writing them carefully (sometimes with a time limit because we were in class after all) and finishing the creative pieces. 
I think it was in 6th grade when I entered a journalism contest — the 2009 Division Elementary Schools Press Conference. We had a great time even though the contest was a little bit rigged. We had to write not only journalistic pieces but also skits. Additionally, we had to perform them! I think we were behind a piece of cloth and had to pretend we were a radio station. We had sound effects, I even brought our rainmaker for additional sounds, and we had to act with our voices. I think I was a scriptwriter at this point. (Here’s a picture just for giggles. I’m 2nd from the right. Yes, the one with the big light blue headband.)
I knew right then that I wanted to continue journalism but more importantly, I wanted to continue creatively writing. In high school, it was pretty much the same. Poems, haiku, personal essays, book reviews, script writing for plays, and many more. I also became part of the school newspaper Highlights. I transferred to a different school in high school and I remember being fascinated about the school newspaper. It was so much cooler than the newspaper in our old school. It was huge (just like a real newspaper), it had pretty graphics, but most importantly it had creative pieces. Along with prom news articles and schoolmates winning medals, there were poems under pen names. I fell in love with it. I don’t exactly remember when I became part of it but I was designated as a feature writer which I know some call creative journalism. I truly don’t remember the feature articles I wrote during the time I was a feature writer. I might have to look through some old copies I have.
By senior year, I was promoted to news editor. I remember missing feature writing. I spent time on reading and editing news articles, approving topics, sending edited copies to our editor-in-chief (also one of my best friends). I remember our EIC also being President of the Student Government so we had to support her more since she had a lot of responsibilities. By then I didn’t miss creative writing that much because we still had the opportunity to do it in literature class and even the other classes. Aside from that, I wrote my own novels (not particularly good ones but one does have quite a few thousand reads on Wattpad) which I made my classmates read. I even wrote some of them using a typewriter!
College came and I seriously debated whether I should take the journalism path but in the end, I ended up in the environmental science route. One of my first tasks in college was to give a speech to the whole college batch (and some other university students who decided to attend). I did struggle to think of what to say to these strangers about a discipline that I am just entering and know only 1% about. I pushed through though and was quite pleased with the speech I gave.
Creative writing still accompanied me through the requirements we had. Personal essays and reflection papers on movies and seminars we watched and attended. Additionally, pieces on art exhibits we’ve visited. Since I was studying Human Ecology which is an applied science, we had to work on a lot of written pieces regarding climate change, sustainability, poverty, and other societal and environmental issues. 
As we progressed through university, research works have occupied my time but I still enjoyed it and considered it as writing creatively. Not strictly creative writing per se but I did enjoy picking creative and compelling topics and arranging my ideas into (not to toot my own horn) good papers. I even had the opportunity to present in an international conference where I’ve discovered how vast of a discipline I am in (photo). There were so many great and creative topics discussed during the entire conference. I know that the academic field, research in particular, may not be considered creative writing. However, I loved injecting creativity into mine and loved knowing how other people creatively came up with their topics.
Come graduation, I have finally joined the unemployed percentage of the workforce. Looking for a job is NOT easy. When I finally got one, I was hired within my own college’s department. We were tasked to create medium and long-term plans for (often faraway) towns’ development. Technical writing has been my life for 2 years now and although you can inject some bit of creativity into the documents and plans, it still had this formal feel to it. I’ve had my ~creative writing~ fix through reading more books but honestly, I missed creating and writing. So here we are, me blogging (again). I thought about making pieces as a freelance writer but honestly, it’s hard to be approved and there’s still a degree of greatness you have to have. Compelling and interesting pieces among other compelling and interesting pieces. So for now, I’ll pour my creative juices into blogging and honing my writing skills again.
alex in reverie 