Feeling Un-creative in Creative Writing I

In my Creative Writing I class here at Rowan University, we have been assigned the task of writing a story. It will be eight to ten pages long, typed, and must have all of the dynamics of a short story. This includes but is not limited to an antagonist and protagonist, there must be a conflict. My main character must want something externally that is obvious, and then something internal which is harder to spot.

My beginning must provide background, establish a dramatic question, and drop the reader into the middle of the action. There must be three conflicts in the middle of my story, and there must be a trigger event, a bleak moment, and complications. In the end of the story, My character must learn a lesson or make a discovery, and then there must be a resolution or change in my character.

Besides the fact that these requirements are not the ONLY way to write a short fiction story, I do not think my professor should enforce this assignment on all of us. Not every single creative writer is a short story writer or even a story writer at all. Poets, novelists, children’s stories. We should be able to write what we are comfortable with writing… but I am required to write this farce of a story for a grade, so here is how it is going to go. Feel free to critique. I came up with the plot in a matter of 10-15 minutes, and it is rather cliché I am sad to admit.

My character Lilith Harrison is a smart girl living in the upper middle class neighborhood of Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. Learning comes naturally to her, and there is nothing she cannot accomplish once she sets her mind to it. Still, her father Gregory Harrison III has pushed her to go to school to become a doctor, and she has been accepted to enter college at Penn State on a scholarship. Her sophomore year of college, she is dorm-ing with an art major named Jane Fitzpatrick. They become fast friends, and as their relationship becomes solid, they discover that Lilith’s talents extend to include that of an amazing artist. All she would need is tutelage. Lilith decides to switch her major from that of medicine, to art. Only when she tells her father, he is livid. He wants her to become a doctor, and a doctor she shall be. For a while, she gives in to her father’s wishes, but soon grows weary of her classes. As the year progresses, she must deal with her father’s disapproval as she continues her love of art on the side, Jane’s apparent jealousy of Lilith, and the enterance of a well known artist taking an interest in her.

Let me know what you think. It’s a load of bull simply spewing out of my mind at the moment.