My Discipline

1. Students of my major, creative writing, learn how to best discover their own voices in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction through the analysis of others works, the analysis of our own work, and various critiques.

2. Typically, unemployment (as my father would say), just kidding. Usually, people with my major tend to go on to professions completely unrelated to their major (i.e. flight attendants, CEOs, and teachers) because it is such a hard profession to truly succeed in.

3. The aforementioned near-impossibility of success in this field led to me really want to do it (I'm weird in that way). Moreover, the opportunity to change the world with the written word just has my idol, Hunter S. Thompson, utilized was also a major factor in my decision to pursue a creative writing degree.

4. Three Important Figures in Creative Writing circa 2016:

1. Chuck Palahniuk
• He is exciting to me because he has a sardonic and grotesque writing style similar to my own and has achieved significant mainstream success.
2. J.K. Rowling
• She has received enormous profit from one super-successful series of novels.
3. Stephen King
• He has published more books than the two previously mentioned authors combined and has been a household name for decades.

5. Three Important Academic Journals:

1. The New Yorker, published online and in print
2. Ploughshares, published online and in print
3. The Best American Essays, published yearly in print

Young, T. "Cool. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson". 11/23/06 via Flickr. Attribution 2.0 Generic.