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 or 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
dwindle as your education advances. 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 at the age of seven, directly after my first
change of schools and entrance into the 2nd grade. Like most young,
transplanted students that also happen to be a little bit introverted, settling
into a new environment and making friends was an ordeal that proved very
frustrating for both myself and my parents. As a result, I became a pretty anxious kid post-relocation, 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 in 1999.
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 who 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 exactly call many of these examples of high quality literature,
they are still ones of unquestionably high-quality imagination, which I deem to be at least equally 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 had mostly consisted 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
how 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 future professors.
As
a result, my absolute favorite reading cocktail has become something of a
marriage between the imaginative telling of tales that focuses 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 probably across as sounding a bit
dated to modern readers.
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
elaborate 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 a seventeen 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 at the time 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
acutely 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 the story from a close friend or perhaps had happened upon a personal journal entry written by the narrator herself. 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 within 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
