Learning and Practicing

I've learned a valuable lesson from my Creative Writing class: While one can learn a lot from traditional education, knowing how to do something in theory is a lot easier than being able to do it in practice. Case in point, I can easily dream up fantastic worlds, characters, and stories, but when it comes down to actually putting one of them into words, onto paper, I struggle. Turns out, I'm better at writing essays than writing stories, and the reason for that is practice. I've written countless essays for my various classes, and I write a mini pseudo-essay every night. I have lots of practice writing essays, and I'm good at it. I don't think that's a coincidence. I also don't think it's a coincidence that I'm struggling to write a single decent story, despite all I know about story-writing. Since I don't actually practice writing stories, I'm having some trouble actually writing a story.

Of course, that just means that this assignment is good practice, and it's a sign that I need to practice more. Maybe I should add short-story-writing to my daily routine, especially if I eventually want to be any good at it. I've learned a lot about story-writing, but if I actually want to learn it, I need to put it into practice.