While on vacation, I got a really good sense of the work ethic I’ve built up for myself for writing and drawing. I’ve written about creative methods and discipline before (see my Etsy store for the zine about it), but I have a better sense of the long game now. I want to write about that, but I’ve also been meaning to come at it from another way: what I wish college had taught me about practical, everyday creativity.

At my parents’ high school, everyone was required to take a class that was basically Everyday Life Skills. Checkbook balancing, banking, budgeting, getting licenses, owning things: this class wasn’t home ec, but it did teach basic everyday skills that one might not learn at home. It’s the class my mom remembers most fondly, the one she felt proved more useful more often than anything else.

I wish my college had a similar class, a kind of cap for four years of sheltered life and abundant time. My last semester, I did a creative thesis, wherein I wrote a 75-odd page draft of a novel.* It was an incredibly fruitful time for me – I met my advisor once a fortnight, and in between visits, I wrote my little 20-year-old ass off. A friend said she had a hard time getting two or three pages done every two weeks; I was handing in 10 or 14 pages at a go. I had a beautiful room on Beacon Street in Boston with a picture window as long as my bed and taller than me (I’m not short) that overlooked the frozen waves of the Charles River. I miss that room. I sat at my computer, spent most of my days alone, and wrote and wrote. I’m not sure I’ve come close to being that generally satisfied since then, which is both sad and heartening.

That winter, I graduated, and after that… nothing. Almost nothing at all for several years; it’s taken some shaking up in the last 12-18 months to get me to a place where I consider myself creatively worthwhile, to shake that underpinning of self-loathing for not doing what I’m designed to do.

I’ve given some thought about what I would have liked to know. What should they have told me about bringing that hothoused college-based creativity into daily life? What hot tip might have kept me from being mostly creatively dormant for the better part of three years? What could the academic establishment have told me about matching a day job with your creative dreams and needs?

In the meantime, I put it to you, internets: what would you have liked to learn in your last formal education that might have brought you closer to what you actually wanted to do, and more quickly? A class, a suggestion, a mantra? What would have sorted you out earlier? Or if you’re one of those lucky people who managed to do it right, what were you told? How did you approach it?

*This novel has suddenly been showing up prominently in my thoughts, which is weird. Maybe I’ll finish it properly one day after all.