The Basic Elements

Apr 14, 2008 - 07:56 AM PST

This morning, right before I woke up, I had a dream that Erykah Badu was my poetry teacher. She was grading some work we had done, and she pulled me aside and told me she couldn't even put a grade on mine because I had missed half of the assignment. She said my poem was missing the basic elements. She didn't go into detail about what those basic elements were, but as I pondered in the shower this morning, I realized that she meant my poem was missing emotion - and that emotions are the basic elements to any creative piece, whether its a song, a short story, a painting, etc. Without emotion, there is emptiness. Anyone can use poetic devices like similies, alliteration, iambic pentameter, etc. But art is only good when emotion is involved.

I guess that's what my former magazine teacher Clay Felker was trying to explain to me a few years ago. He said, basically, that my writing wouldn't be great until I experienced something. When I was in his class in grad school about 4 years ago, I hadn't really been through anything too bad or painful. Sure, I'd been in a car accident, broke up with the person I thought was going to be "the one," but besides that, nothing serious had really happened to me. In my current stage in life, I've been through a whole lot more and realize what Clay was talking about. My job now is to tap into my feelings about my experiences and write them down!