Petal for Your Thoughts ?: Creative Writing Commentary

Hello, there! Long time, no see eh?

?? ? In truth, I'm still a bit conflicted over what exactly I want this blog to be, so just take this as my way of testing the waters with a stab at a different kind of submission. Hitherto, I haven't thought to post any of my academic work, but seeing as the content of the following essay so aligns with what I at least have come to associate this blog with (my personal thoughts on writing, reading, and etc.), I figured I might as well try and give it a shot.
?? ? So, getting right down to business then:?The following is the final essay I wrote just recently for the creative writing class I've been taking whilst abroad. Unlike most of the required essays I write, this one I rather enjoyed. In it, I cover my original literary influences and consider my own history as a reader before delving into a more in-depth discussion of the creative work I've turned out this semester. I'm still considering whether or not I'll actually post those pieces which I make reference to in the body of the essay, but haven't yet decided either way.
?? ? In any case, here it is... Mainly for the purpose of making sure it's not entirely forgotten in the constant jumble that is my Macbook's documents folder.

So... lead on, MacDuff!

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?? ? In the beginning, I think everyone starts out as an effortlessly unique being armed with an avid imagination. When you?re a kid, you?re allowed to spin out impossible tales at the dinner table and narrate entire expeditions to lands unknown to yourself in the backyard. At that time in life it?s both normal and accepted to express yourself creatively, and oftentimes it?s encouraged. However, at least from my experience attending high school in America, this creative indulgence seems to end abruptly as you progress in education. The use of imagination and what you might call ?style? don?t have much place in the five-paragraph essay world, and most often for good reason, as the central purpose of an essay is to clearly demonstrate a student?s argumentative powers in support of their ideas. Freedom of expression in regards to the representation of those ideas is something that isn?t widely practiced or encouraged during most of these formative years, and I think that?s why it struck me as almost unnatural that at the beginning of this semester I was confronted with a blank page that I could fill in whatever way I wanted.
?? ? ? ? ? ?The practice of creative writing for me, then, is largely a playground; an area in which I can experiment, do as I like, and hopefully learn from my mistakes in the process. However, I think before you can know the writer, you have to first become familiar with the reader. To take a quote from Stephen King that serves as #1 in my own personal writer?s gospel, ?If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write." The opening lecture to this course, if I remember correctly, echoed this statement, and so a discussion of my history as a reader will act as an introduction to my analysis of my own writing.

??????????? My love for reading began to sprout at the age of seven, directly after my first change of schools and entrance into the 2^nd grade. Like most young, transplanted students that also happen to be a little bit introverted, settling into a new environment and making new friends was an ordeal that proved very frustrating for both myself and my parents at first. As a result, after our move I became a pretty anxious kid, and one that didn?t get to sleep very easily at nights. One thing my book-loving father thought might help was if we struck up a nightly ritual of relaxed, before-bed reading together. I was skeptical at first; hearing my dad drone on in a monotone about fictional people didn?t sound too exciting, so I remember sitting down to our first reading almost determined to be bored. However, as we started with C.S. Lewis? ?The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,? that was very quick to change. By the time I hit third grade we had made it through the entirety of ?The Chronicles of Narnia,? Ursula Le Guin?s ?Earthsea? trilogy, and ?The Hobbit.? And, with the advent of Harry Potter, I began taking my first steps towards becoming an avid reader myself.

??????????? When considering that these were the first stories to really capture my interest, it seems only natural that I count them among those that were the most formative in my development as a writer. To this day, writers that seem to have boundless imaginations and which turn out tales of alien worlds and situations that are far removed from my own realm of experience are some of those I hold in the highest esteem. Just like so many of my generation, my young mind was inundated with pumpkin juice and the endless possibility of magic and adventure at a very impressionable age, and so multiple works belonging to the genre have stayed with me. Although I would not name these examples of high quality literature, they are still ones of unquestionably high-quality imagination, which I deem to be equally as important. ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

??????????? The second chapter of my reading history and the one that is most influential on my writing in regards to style began during my middle school years between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Prior to this point, my literary palate was mostly composed of fantasy or science fiction novels, very few relating to a world that bore much resemblance to my own. However, as I continued my education, required reading lists and English classes that challenged me to pay more attention to what I read and what I thought about other?s writing forced me into entirely new reading territory and away from my preferred genres. A subset of one of my English classes entitled ?Reading the Classics? introduced me to the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Austen, and Wilde, among many others. These were to become the new giants of my reading world, and their penchant for long, descriptive sentences and prose that was near to bursting with adverbs entered my literary heart and left its distinctive mark on my writing, much to the chagrin of some of my professors.

??????????? As a result, my absolute favorite reading cocktail has become something of a marriage between the imaginative telling of tales that focus on the unreal or surreal aspects of life alongside descriptive prose and a character-driven narrative. However, what I consider to be ?good? writing is much more fluid, though consideration of an author?s power of description and language still rank as highly important in my evaluation of their work. Among the more contemporary authors I admire, Neil Gaiman is one that scores high in most if not all of these categories, making him a good example of the kinds of topics I like to explore when I choose to write of a more fantastic and less realistic world. Another of my favorite authors, American writer Ursula Le Guin, champions the importance of language choice in creative fiction when she says in her manifesto that ?A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it? they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls?? and, presumably, the ?soul? of their work. Over the course of the semester, I tried to take this passage to heart and even hung it up on my wall for good measure, hoping it would serve as a constant reminder to be more self-aware as I wrote.

??????????? In the first piece I sent in for submission, ?The First Descent,? I set out to use one of the plot devices I appreciate most from the literary world: A Gaimanesque twist in which the reader is introduced to the narrator in a setting that initially appears quite familiar, but some unexpected event experienced by the protagonist opens his or her eyes to what hidden secrets might lie beneath the guise of normalcy. Secondly, I wanted to incorporate some elements of the elevated style used by my favorite Victorian writers to give the narrator a unique inner voice that would come across as sounding a bit dated.

??????????? On the first count, I think I was largely successful in my portrayal of the event that would act as the catalyst for the narrator. Comments I received surrounding the scene were favorable at least in regards to my visual depiction of the destruction of the classroom, for example. However, my original intentions concerning the not quite possible, dream-like qualities of the event didn?t come across quite as clearly as I?d intended, engendering varying levels of confusion in my peers. Was it supposed to be a natural disaster? Was it the apocalypse? Did all the other classmates die? My answers of ?no? to each of these questions only seemed to raise more eyebrows and merit further explanation from myself, which seems to indicate that I evidently did not represent my intentions clearly enough to make them recognizable. In my description of the event, I had meant to maintain some level of obscurity in my avoidance of specifying the exact cause of the chaos, as I intended for the narrator to later have the chance to discover the source for herself. However, on some level I think I may have underplayed the level of impossibility I?d meant to convey to the point of confusing my readers more than was absolutely necessary. Also, what further complicated the issue was that each time I sat down to write the scene immediately following the narrator?s journey to the window and it came time to reveal the source of the noise, I panicked. The expansive style in which I had written the beginning of the story combined with the plot that had grown too complex and unwieldy to fit into the strict parameters of a short story proved too daunting a task for me to complete. Perhaps when I get the time to really sit down and work out a comprehensive outline, I might be able to puzzle out which direction I want the story to go and then work from there. For now, it remains a slightly confusing beginning to a project that became much larger than originally anticipated and one that I hope to return to later.

??????????? However, apart from my private concerns centering on the plot of ?The First Descent,? I received very critical feedback regarding the writing style during its first round of peer reviews as well. I know I shouldn?t have been surprised, seeing as I?m fully aware that I?m a naturally verbose writer who always needs several solid editing sessions before my prose is fit to be seen by public eyes, but even so I was. As another anecdote from Stephen King goes, ?the road to hell is paved with adverbs," and that was exactly the case with the first draft of ?Descent.? During this initial workshop, my writing was characterized as ?overly heavy,? ?weighted down,? and ?unrealistic for a teenage narrator.? Many insisted that an eighteen to nineteen year old no matter what parallel universe she was in could never realistically manage to chronicle her bizarre life experiences with such an ?extensive? vocabulary. And while I begged to differ and will now admit to feeling a bit insulted on behalf of the many intelligent teenagers I?ve known, I did of course see their point. Although I persisted in maintaining the elevated style, in the initial draft there were indeed too many words and, as always, at least a third of them needed to go. It was actually after the final editing of ?The First Descent? that I decided to submit the poem included in my portfolio, whose first draft also met with positively biting critique vocabulary-wise, although I think the final product, ?Walking in the Woods,? is one of my better attempts at the form.?

??????????? In my second attempt at a short story, however, I tried to do something different; something smaller, more manageable, and less expansive in scope than the first. I decided to draw from my own experience as a student studying in a foreign country, which is exactly the position the narrator of ?Transitions? occupies. As I anticipate moving into my very first apartment next semester and am already aware of the various emotions involved in being young and on one?s own, I wanted to explore some of the tougher moments that go along with returning to an empty, cold apartment after an extended stay back home. ?Transitions? is definitely very different from ?The First Descent? in both form and content, but where I think it differs most is its narrative voice. While both are written in first person, I meant for the ?Transitions? narrator to come across much more personably. I wanted the tone of the story to strike a conversational, almost confessional note, one that read as if the reader was hearing this story from a close friend or perhaps had the sense that the narrator had written the story down in a personal journal somewhere. I tried to evoke emotion in a much simpler way this time around with little slice-of-life details that I hoped would be fairly relatable for almost everyone, and I think for the most part I succeeded. This story is much less formal than the last one, and it certainly falls in the realm of my own personal experience, so it?s a fairly unexplored genre of writing for me that I think I would like to try again.

??????????? Although as I get older I begin to gain a clearer perspective as to what sort of writer I am and what sort of writer I?d like to become, I can?t exactly pin down a specific phrase that summarizes where my writing stands or where I hope it will one day land on the map of contemporary literature. Stephen King, who says ?I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries? may be able to pinpoint where he is on the map, but I?m still busy romping around the imaginative playground that?s my blank page, trying to figure out what I like to do best and what works for me personally. As my creative writing portfolio for this semester shows, I like to try working in different genres and styles to see how the metaphorical glove fits. Short stories have proven a challenge for my long-winded prose style, but are great for forcing me to focus my narratives and wind down the dial on vocabulary, making poetry an even more difficult medium. Overall, I believe this course allowed me room to test my writing in ways I hadn?t previously had occasion for, and I can honestly say I learned more from the failures that were pointed out to me (sometimes repeatedly) in class than those I privately decided for myself behind a computer screen. Through my work this semester, I?ve learned that I write to experiment, to explore, and to challenge myself to do better each time. I write to exercise; to stretch my imagination in different directions and see how far it can go before it pulls a muscle, and I hope that regimen will someday help me get to the point where I can say what kind of writer I am. But until then, I?ll keep playing.

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Okay, folks: That's all she wrote!

See you next time!

Torey

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