To Talk About Myself and Genre (x_x)

        I'm not exactly sure what to say about my writing. It's usually in the first person, though I've been forcing myself to use third person lately. I usually lean toward funny or romantic (or both) when writing stories. I only write short stories because I don't have the discipline or self-confidence to go any longer than that. I recently finished a short story entitled Almost There (after a groundbreaking 1969 novel titled I'll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Wait of which it's loosely based) that was surprisingly well-received. I'm being pushed to make that one longer, but I'm running into the aforementioned problems in my plight.

        I have enjoyed the Creative Writing program here so far. My last teacher was Aaron Burch and he was a great teacher. He had a laissez-faire approach to teaching this subject which was was great for me. I don't really think that this is a subject that can be micromanaged. He was open to suggestion and was easy to talk to and readily available. Those qualities were very helpful in a Creative Writing teacher.

        Genre, to me, is just the different categories pieces of writing go into. These categories can be defined by the topic or its similarity to other pieces of writing. Different genres like mystery or romance can easily be distinguished from each other because they don't cover the same topics or have enough similarity to be lumped together. The exact same thing should go for different genres such as poetry or prose, but there are certain types of poetry that read like prose (like epic poetry), so the lines are blurred there and it's not as distinguishable. (I didn't know there was a difference between genre fiction and literary fiction and I still don't understand the difference.)

        I honestly don't think I've had any experience with reading or writing transgenre or anything that falls outside of traditional genre categories. I don't read or write nearly as much as I used to and when I do, it's usually pretty conventional. I have no problems with reading outside of the box, I just haven't had many opportunities to do so. Like I said before, comedy and romance are usually what I write about in my works because that's really all that I have any experience in. I'm hoping that as I get older I can better write about other topics as I experience them.