Bachelor's Degree

I have a creative writing degree. I don't have it laminated or framed and stuck to the wall over my desk, but I have one. It's the thing that keeps me typing away - that and the voice of Billy Crystal in "Throw Mama From the Train." He said, "Remember, a writer writes!" Then he went home and stared at his typewriter. It's a funny movie about writer's block.
As a freshman in college I took the first in a seemingly endless series of creative writing workshops. My instructor was a TA - a cool guy with a moustache and didn't seem to have a particular agenda for us as blossoming writers - he admonished us at the end of the course to "keep the habit of a pen." I took this advice literally for many years - insisting that a Bic Rolling Writer was the only tool for my best and deepest thoughts and inspirations. This replaced my beast of a manual Underwood typewriter as my mechanical means of musing. I filled spiral notebook after spiral notebook with poems, short stories and endless bits of potential comedy. I took the advice to heart - I grew a callus on my thumb from the death grip I kept on my Bic.
But there weren't a great many professors interested in reading my pent-up scrawl. I got an electric typewriter. The best thing about an electric typewriter is that it hums. It sits there and waits with all that potential energy and when you start to write, it explodes in a pica space tab set shift lock flurry of which my eighth grade typing teacher would be proud.
Computers were confounding to me. I was a confirmed Luddite. When I worked at a video store, I begrudgingly did data entry and inventory control with these new fangled machines - but I dragged my typewriter into the back room when it was time to do the monthly newsletter. I did all the layout on a tagboard pasteup sheet - cutting and pasting in the most literal way imaginable. Then one day, the video store closed. I had graduated from college with degree in creative writing, run a video store and had no marketable skills. Happily, my mother was able to hook me up with a friend of hers who had helped ease her transition into the world of personal computers. I learned the ways of Wordstar. I learned to highlight and replace - to cut and paste with a click of the mouse. If you liked a paragraph, you could keep it and delete the rest. Magic!
Word processing is creative writing. I can use italics - if I want to (a later version of that creative writing instructor insisted that exclamation marks and italics were signs of weak writing. Your words should carry your meaning. Maybe she was right. Then again, maybe she didn't know what she was talking about!