March 29, 2024

The Dream of Creative Writing

Author: Wesley Fryer
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I have been doing quite a bit of soul-searching in the past few weeks and months, and I have played with several ideas for my future that are worth noting. One of these is my desire to write fiction, to unleash my creative imagination in a channel detached almost entirely from education and educational technology. I am not saying I am going to seriously do this in the upcoming weeks and months, but it is something which I have thought about a bit, and I want to reflect upon briefly tonight.

I’ve started reading Joseph Campbell’s classic book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” from which we derive “The Hero’s Journey.” This is a pattern which we find in myth, great stories of literature, and great stories depicted now in movies. It is summarized quite well in this TedEd video, which I showed to our daughter last week and is one of my favorites whenever I discuss storytelling and digital storytelling with others.

In chapter 1 of Campell’s book this evening, I ran across this lovely summary, a turn a phrase I both respect and enjoy:

“… these are the everlastingly recurrent themes of the wonderful song of the soul’s high adventure.”

Joseph Campbell, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”

Thoughts of creative writing with joy also bring to mind Liz Gilbert’s wonderful book, “Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear,” and “Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking” by David Bayles and Ted Orland. With the image of the band Queen‘s retreat to a rural English farm in 1975 to compose “A Night at the Opera” and Bohemian Rhapsody, fresh on my mind from the movie by the same name, I find myself wondering what sorts of creative tales my mind could unleash given the opportunity to disconnect from the world as I know it now and tap into my own creative imagination?

As I ponder the professional opportunities and decisions which lie ahead of my family and I in the coming week, a desire to write and rediscover myself as a prolific author is one idea among many on my mind. I have loved so many things about the past four years, being a school director of technology, but the circumstances and context of my work has encouraged me to almost entirely stop writing. This is both a vocation and hobby about which I am passionate and dearly love, and plan to reclaim in the months ahead.

(This is my first mobile blogged post using the new WordPress block-based writing interface, and largely dictated using speech to text on my iPad.)

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