Imagine you are a season of the year.

(Pasadena chalk art)

I'm taking a creative writing class called "Perfecting the Short Story," and the first one was Tuesday night.

Six out of the 13 people in the class came to L.A. to become an actor or actress, including the teacher. I don't know why I find that humorous, but I do.

The teacher wore a long-sleeved, burgandy crushed-velvet dress with knee-high black boots and a colorful scarf. Her hair was messy and frizzy and she wore "funky" earrings. SO typical boho creative writing teacher.

She gave us a couple of in-class writing assignments right off the bat. The first one was "Write about something that happened to you today. Embellish and be imaginative. Make it extraordinary."

Everyone in the class wrote about how they felt when the alarm went off in the morning and what they had for breakfast.

I didn't. This is supposed to be a fiction writing class, and I like writing fiction. So I "embellished." Everyone afterward thought that my story was true after I'd read it aloud. Did I bother to correct them? Nope! Just call me James Frey. Heh.

I'm not enthralled with the class syllabus (riddled with typos, by the way, but whatev), which includes assignments like "Imagine you are a season of the year and write a story about it" and "Cut out pictures from magazines and make a collage. Bring the collage to share with the class."

If I had known the class would consist primarily of hokey writer's block exercises, I wouldn't have bothered signing up. Silly me. The title of the class is "Perfecting the Short Story," so I thought that's what we'd be doing.

I'll stick with the class because I already paid for it, and I'll try to get from it what I can. Maybe something good will come from it, but for now, I'm irritated.