Thursday, November 03, 2011

Creative Nonwriting

I just heard a student accidentally refer to my nonfiction class as "Creative Nonwriting,"  but trust me on this: we won't be developing a major in Creative Nonwriting any time soon, despite its potential popularity.

Many students arrive on campus as highly accomplished nonwriters and devote four years to further developing their Creative Nonwriting skills. Some are talented enough to tackle a PhD in Creative Nonwriting. In fact, much of a PhD's process depends upon the ability to come up with creative reasons to not write, so perhaps many of my colleagues have made careers out of Creative Nonwriting.

I suppose we could design a major in Creative Nonwriting, with Intro to Excuse-Making serving as the prerequisite for Survey of Procrastination I and II, Research/Shmesearch, Technology for Nonwriting, Nonreading for Nonwriters, Nontheory of Nonwriting, and so on. Such an unusual major would sell itself (negating any need to do any advertising nonwriting), but one big obstacle stands in the way of implementing a successful Creative Nonwriting program: Who will write the course proposal?

2 comments:

Laura said...

I've already decided I'll definitely try to not write a creative non-writing course proposal. I think I'll succeed.

Anonymous said...

About there is a lot it of.

D.