Teaching creative writing in Palestine: One of my goals in Palestine was to teach Creative Writing to university students, preferably students of English Literature, of which there are plentiful in the area. The University of Hebron offers a Bachelor in English. About 1000 students are enrolled at the moment, most of them unsure what to do with their degrees once finished.

Creative writing has the potential to help language learners (and job seekers) in many ways; it inspires, teaches new vocabulary and it allows them to express themselves in ways that don’t require a structure. Students learning a new language are often overwhelmed by grammar and the rules that govern the foreign language, having the liberty to write freely can be a breath of fresh air! Not only because of the freedom it gives, but because it encourages many valuable skills, including independent thinking.

In this day and age when we seem to compete more and more with machines for jobs and sustenance, it is extremely important to focus on the skills that make us human. Jack Ma, a prominent Chinese businessman, has pointed this out on the World Economic Forum this year and encourages young people to work more on their independent thinking and soft skills. How else will you differentiate from a machine? Creative writing is a wonderful way to develop independent thinking, as it requires that one expresses their more intimate thoughts and feelings in creative ways.

A very valuable and extremely needed skill that creative writing develops is empathy. When we engage ourselves in the creative writing process we must be vulnerable, we must open up and share our deepest feelings, fears and desires. The creations have to be shared with other people, we read our work to each other and become even more vulnerable because we have to receive feedback from one another and from the teacher. When we hear each other’s stories, we see ourselves in them, we develop empathy by realizing how similar (or different) our feelings can be. This is especially valuable when we take this class with people different from us.

The challenge with creative writing can lie in the fact that students are sometimes too used to structure and following rules, to the point that when we take those away and allow them to think freely and write about anything that comes to their minds, they find themselves paralyzed, struggling to find the words. But creativity is all around us, and it sprouts from awareness, from allowing ourselves to sit still, paralyzed, and observe, until the words come to us. Learning to become aware is an art that we all need to develop and creativity will follow, this is the skill we should be fostering.

Unfortunately, my plan has not been achieved as I expected. I am afraid people here are not so familiar with the benefits of this kind of class, and the time to convince my audience is limited. I write this, mostly with the hope that someone else will come after me and take the idea up again, maybe having more luck with the crowd.