In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke advises writers:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

To become a skilled writer, you must read. To become a close reader, you must listen. To become an artist, you must think like and live like Rilke. Creative Writing  will not give you all the answers, but you’ll learn to ask more critical questions.

Creative writing skills will make you a better scholar, student, and citizen. That’s what reading literature does and that’s what Creative Writing will do, too .

Writing fiction is about risk taking. It’s about the fundamental desire to be heard. We need a safe space to do so. We need thick skin and an open mind to do so better. We need a toolbox stocked with craft, voice, and style. In On Writing, Stephen King claims that “to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscles so you can carry it with you.”

Creative Writing will help you discover and sharpen your writing tools. It will empower you to tell the best possible version of your story, to cheer you on while you revise it, and to hold you accountable for the moves you make on the page.