"Water never looked so good as when you're down on the desert floor..."

I think in most cases doing courses on creative things tends to stifle them and put them in a box (as in makes them standard and not truly imaginative). However if you think it will motivate you when you're blocked then it may help.

Another way to get motivated is give yourself a deadline and simply just write whatever comes to you - it may be great or you may have to go over it later but it can open you up and get you writing what you want to. (Learnt that can help after recently writing 73 fics in a month to their daily deadlines!)

I think I may start giving myself a regular recurring deadline, just to better develop writing into a habit.

You are very bright, but I hear where you're coming from about the "real life" skills. I'm the last person to be able to offer really good advice, except to say I know you'll figure it out. The summer isn't over yet.

Thanks!

If I could go back, I would not get a Creative Writing degree. Maybe my experience was specific to my school, but I just didn't learn that much I didn't already know. The most important thing about writing is to constantly write, which I don't think they pushed enough, and I could've learned in one semester. The second most important thing, I think, is to have control over your inner editor so you know when to tune it out to just get stuff down and when to turn it on to get rid of the crap.

They also never got around to really challenging us to drastically improve our writing. Most of the classes were almost like high school creative writing classes--just endless workshops and blind praise and always-find-something-nice-to-say and tiptoe around negative feedback.

Lastly, we didn't ever talk about things like meter, sound, rhyme (and their counterparts in other genres) beyond their definitions. Your friend up there is right--creativity is often overly intellectualized in the classroom. And I definitely didn't want to be forced to write villanelles. But I wanted to know the possible reasons to use certain structures, sounds, and figures of speech and what their effects would be on a reader.

But I think I've digressed from answering your question. Don't worry about being a creative writing major. Just write. Just write shit. Just write one word a day, and don't care about what it is, and if you want to write more, write more, and then write just one word the next day, and who cares what it is you're writing because they don't have to see it and you will learn something from it. Unfortunately, writing that paragraph was me being the biggest hypocrite ever.

As for school, if you only have another couple of semesters left, I might just stick with it. I would at least wait one semester to leave and spend the time researching other schools. Just find classes you'll enjoy. If you have room for electives, try to take writing classes that are not necessarily creative, just because they will help you with that discipline. And as for real world skills, you could start looking for an internship. Surely your school has an internship coordinator. There should be plenty of opportunities in the publishing industry in SF. If you find an internship, just be willing to do anything and everything they want, and show off your internet skills--all my friends who have jobs say that their supervisors are impressed with their basic search engine knowledge, even though to us that isn't so impressive.

OK now I've talked way too much. I got excited because we are in similar boats, although it's too late for me to get an internship in the industry. Let me know if you want to talk about it more--my AIM is still dannyboy2186 and I'm on facebook and stuff.

This is actually very reassuring, since I don't run into a lot of people in this bucket around my current circles. I think once I get back into the swing of writing regularly and make a true habit of it, a lot of my hesitations about the whole education issue will go away.

I too am on Facebook and my AIM (if I'm ever on) is still Mlady Bedivere. More than happy to keep chatting about this or whatever else.