Telling people my major in college has become a repetitive process.
There’s a moment where they ask me, innocently and habitually curious, and there’s a half-second where I debate whether or not I should lie. Sometimes, depending on the person, I do. Old people at work, grocery clerks who see the college t-shirt, estranged relatives I won’t see until the next funeral. Education is more digestible. Journalism is respectable. Even just English followed by “excuse me” and leaving works most of the time.
Every now and then, depending on the stranger and the time, I tell them.
“English and Creative Writing.”
“Oh.”
It’s almost scripted: The wide eyes, the question in their voice, the death of whatever conversation we were having. Sometimes, like my high school guidance counselor or the parents of friends who went off to major in Biology and Architecture, there’s a wrinkle of the nose and an awkward little laugh that comes with it, too. And then, with a little variation depending on how polite they’re trying to be or how genuinely incredulous they are, there is always:
“Well, what are you going to do with that?”
People have no idea what to do with English majors, let alone Creative Writing majors – it’s a sin in the eyes of every stem-forward household and school board, every conservative grandparent and corporate uncle. When I was in high school, I had a parent of a classmate ask me if I was planning on marrying rich. Her son went on to drop out of community college after half a semester, but that didn’t matter because he was a Business major – his attempt is deemed more acceptable than my success.
There’s an expectation that the major you choose and the path you go down has to be a path: clear cut through suburbia, sidewalk underneath, no pit stops or roadblocks and God forbid no detours. To most people, Creative Writing sounds like a traipse through the woods, a brambling and winding path with no exit and for no reason.
I saw something online a few weeks ago, some Tweet or TikTok comment or screenshot relic of an old Tumblr post, that said something like, “Any terrible and horrible and uniquely human emotion you’re feeling, Dostoyevsky has already written it down.”
I keep coming back to that phrase in my mind because to me, that is the purpose of creative writing and studying creative writing: to bridge human nature and experiences with something as concrete and tangible as the written word. To know that whatever is going on in my world has also happened in someone else’s world, real or fictional, and that somewhere there is an idea written down of the before and the after of that.
Not only is that the purpose of creative writing, but that’s what it is. Stephen King calls it telepathy– this idea that writing is a conversation between people who have never met, that it’s plucking ideas from one mind and sending them to another like a love letter. It’s a conversation that can happen locally or internationally, in the same time zone or across decades and centuries of time. Writing is connection and building bridges and shoveling paths through the snow.
Think about ancient Greece. We know the Greeks worshiped a chorus of gods because they left statues behind for us to find, giant monuments depicting otherworldly men and women wielding lightning bolts and pomegranates in a way that could only be godly. We found marbled columns and ruined pillars and painted vases and pots that suggested that these figures meant something of great importance to the people. We knew they existed, and we had our ideas, but we didn’t truly know the gods until we found the Iliad and the Odyssey. Through Homer’s story, we learn how Athena was cunning and strategic and tried to protect Odysseus. We learn that Apollo is often jealous and that Poseidon is vengeful and unforgiving when faced with arrogance.
With Homer’s words, we see these previously-unobtainable deities as almost humanlike, capricious and powerful and each one unique. The artifacts and the architecture left behind from ancient Greece give us clues and maps about how the Greeks might have lived, but the stories paint a vivid picture of what it was like to be a Greek in the time of the gods. Homer’s tale about one doomed warrior and another man’s journey home helps to bridge the gap between ancient Greece and modern society, beginning a conversation over two thousand years ago and still inviting people to join in today.
Writing is at the core of society. It’s an integral part of every culture and every cornerstone of humanity. It’s this giant, enormous thing that envelops everyday life as naturally as the atmosphere around us, so I understand when people don’t really know what to say or do when I mention it’s what I’m studying. Even I struggle to talk about it – on the occasion when I’m honest and tell them I’m a creative writing major, that I’ve switched majors three times and always find my way back to fiction or that I’m thinking about applying to grad schools. Sometimes they follow up and ask me if I want to write a book one day or if I’m writing anything at the moment, and I clam up and I smile, utter a “maybe” or a “that’d be really nice” and change the subject to anything else. In casual conversation, how can I let people know that what they just asked me is akin to asking if I ever perform open-heart surgery on myself for fun? If I ever pull my heart from my chest and hold it, pumping and working in the palm of my hand, just to watch my own blood flow and decide if I think it’s beautiful? There is no sane way to put that into words.
So, when the less inclined ask me what my major is, I’ll continue to lie. I’ll tell them I plan on becoming a journalist, or a teacher, or some other guidance-counselor-approved career, and I’ll let them tell me about their child or niece or grandson or whoever is on track to be a biochemical engineer or a lawyer or a social worker. And if I don’t lie, if I tell them I’m a writer and they look at me with their mouths agape while they try to think of how to salvage whatever conversation they thought they were having, I hope they’ll be able to find the words.
— Nichole Maryse Harris (BA ’25)
K-State English 