Week 8 Reading and Writing

There's an interesting dichotomy I think, between any work I look back on and the work I am currently writing. As I'm in the process of writing something, the ideas are flourishing, and the story seems to unfold spectacularly, with no flaws. However, after publishing something, leaving it for a week, and coming back again to look on it, it's so...awkward and chunky. Grammar mistakes, spelling mistakes, sentence structure and overall flow - invisible weeds that suddenly become visible after not working on it for some time. The feeling I thought I had conveyed to the reader, upon visiting the story again as a reader - it's just not what I had envisioned in my mind. But the frustration of it all - I don't have the proper vocabulary or mastery of writing techniques to properly express this idea in my mind. I don't have the "meat" needed to beef up the bones of my story. I look at stories that I think are really well done - "Avatar: The Last Airbender" (the TV show), Douglas Adam's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,"  Frederic Brown's "The Answer" - and aspire to be able to just write something like that. I need more practice, for sure, and perhaps I'll never attain that stage of writing. But it never hurts to try.

This class has definitely steered me toward this. Outside of it, I get too "busy" and distracted by other things (like my phone, whoops!), but having a class whose assignments make you write, but doesn't grade in a rigid format - MAN, it's nice to be able to shake the dust off the creative wings. There's no fear in failing to meet a certain rubric. I'm free to explore the possibilities of how my thoughts can be transferred to others in a way that evokes a certain response. In one of my other classes recently, I was docked 15 points (out of 75!) for not having the same opinion in my argumentative paper as my professor. How frustrating is it to put out your best effort, then receive a C on it because you didn't follow exactly what someone else believed, when the point of the assignment was to argue for something you believe to be true? The problem is, though, after years of expecting this, it's normal to go for the best grade, even at the cost of your creativity. And consequently, at the beginning of the class, when prompted to suddenly come up with a story on my own, I really struggled. We explored this through the Growth Mindset readings, and it's true! To be honest, my first story was an experiment to test the limits of how far I could go with the ridiculousness of my stories. It worked out in the end, though. I think Calvin put it best:

(Calvin and Hobbes, Jan. 27, 1994)

I'm looking forward to the rest of this class and being able to compare my writing at the end of the class to the beginning to see how much has changed or improved. Exciting!