Genre
Found poem
The found poem was interesting. I had never heard of a found poem before, which was funny because I took a Writing Poetry course last semester. Professor Block never mentioned the found poem, but I’m glad I discovered it because the seemingly unorganized yet carefully crafted structure of this particular genre of poetry suits my mind and personality very well. It sounded like an interesting challenge to pick bits and pieces from my tweets and create a poem out of it, and I thought it would be easy because my thoughts were already all over the place to begin with. But I couldn’t find a theme that could tie the chaos together. I would see a leaf and say something strange about it, then it would snow and I’d talk about white hawks, then a stranger would do something annoying and I’d tweet about that. The only consistent place that I went was staying in my room where nothing interesting happened, so when I went outside, I was surrounded by hundreds of random things that social people take for granted. But to me, they were interesting and had to be tweeted about. So I had a hard time at first with the found poem, I was trying to find this profound thing that would make an amazing poem. But it turns out that the theme was as simple as the weather. My fascination with the weather seemed boring at first, but when I examined that I examined myself and realized that I was so obsessed with things that I saw outside because I don’t allow myself to leave my room very often. Instead of trying to fight my nervousness around strangers, I give in to it and stay inside. So doing the research, I guess you’d call it, for the poem I also researched myself. That’s reflective or reflexive…I get them confused.
Web writing
I’ve always looked at blogging as a diary that’s open to the public, which means that I write down my thoughts, like I would do in a journal, but I’m incredibly self-conscious about every word I write, especially for the blog for this class. I knew that, at the very least, a few of my fellow students would skim through the blog post and write a vague comment to fulfill a course requirement. But I also knew that my teacher would be reading my blogs and that was a little nerve-wracking because sometimes I say things I probably shouldn’t, it’s just that I feel that they need to be said. It’s an unspoken rule that you’re supposed to kiss your teacher’s ass, but that’s not how I operate. If it’s the truth, than it’s true and I write it down, perhaps with language that’s more colorful than necessary, but nevertheless it’s the truth. In the beginning of the semester, I thought that might get me into trouble, but now I’m hoping that my winning personality is earning me some brownie points for making my blog interesting to read. And that's why the course blog was so weird for me to write because the posts were based off of the readings we had to do over the course of the semester. So it was a weird combination of professionalism and my writing style and tone. I'm not sure if that mixed well, but it's too late to do anything about it now. I like it, though.
I think it makes sense to be conscious about what you put on the internet, not just on blog sites, but anywhere, because I hear that it never goes away even after you delete it. That's really creepy. So you have to watch what you say because a lot of people are going to see what you wrote for a really long time. After this class, I'll probably forget I have a weebly site, but it'll still be up here. How many eyes will look at this sentence?
Collaborative writing
We did our project hierarchically, there was a leader of sorts who tweeted everyone about meeting up before/after class and divided up the different sections of the project to the group members. It didn’t feel like a dictatorship, though, because we all naturally fell into line behind Dom, because he liked to talk the most and had the most confidence in the project from the beginning. When our first brainstorm fell through, everyone got discouraged and I believe it was Dom who came up with the next idea. I can’t really remember because I didn’t keep up with my blog, which, in hindsight, was unhelpful, even though we were told that from day one….
I didn’t mind collaborative writing for this particular project because it was such a large endeavor that one person could only accomplish if they had the whole semester and not just one month to do it. But usually I don’t like to collaborate with other writers, I like to claim all words as my own, I don’t like people touching my things. It was helpful to write this paper collaboratively because my group was in a state of perpetual confusion from the first day when we brainstormed. When we were asked about what we were doing, we said “Uhhhhhhh…..” We all had our separate parts we played to contribute to the project, so we all had different things up on our separate websites. Froy might copy and paste from me, change a few sentences, and then maybe Laura might copy and paste from Froy. So everything was similar but different. That’s why we have the disclaimer “sites may vary” because of the way we chose to write the paper. Doing this project showed me that I can work with other people to write, I just prefer not to. We ended up writing our own things anyway.
Writing as Exploration and Inquiry
I based my Twitterive off of my found poem, which I've said before was the beginning of my exploration of myself. My Twitterive was a continuation of that exploration in the form of a FICTIONAL story about a girl who murders everybody so she can be alone. I'm not about to change my lone wolf ways, but this assignment made me conscious of my behavior and made me realize that it has an effect on my writing because I tend to write stories with a very small cast of characters, one person at the least, five at the most, and they are usually detached in some way, either mentally or physically, metaphorically or literally. I noticed that about my stories before, but I never bothered to think why.
Seeing other people's Twitterives in class didn't affect me, I was confident about where my story was supposed to go and what message I would have my character say through her actions and thoughts. To repeat myself again, I don't like to be influenced by other people (except the teacher because he hands out the grades), so everyone else's presentation was simply interesting to look at what other people did. I wrote down the suggestions they were saying to me so they wouldn't be offended, but in the end, it's up to me what I add or delete. It will be done, I'm not that full of myself to think that my story is perfect, but I like to try and work my problems out on my own. It makes the final result that much more satisfying.
This all seems like a monologue about myself and not a direct answer to "how has this class impacted your writing." But I feel that a person can't be a good writer if they don't know why they write. I'm a Junior and you'd think I'd know by now why I write, but that's not true. My creative writing classes helped me figure out what I love to write but not why.
Found poem
The found poem was interesting. I had never heard of a found poem before, which was funny because I took a Writing Poetry course last semester. Professor Block never mentioned the found poem, but I’m glad I discovered it because the seemingly unorganized yet carefully crafted structure of this particular genre of poetry suits my mind and personality very well. It sounded like an interesting challenge to pick bits and pieces from my tweets and create a poem out of it, and I thought it would be easy because my thoughts were already all over the place to begin with. But I couldn’t find a theme that could tie the chaos together. I would see a leaf and say something strange about it, then it would snow and I’d talk about white hawks, then a stranger would do something annoying and I’d tweet about that. The only consistent place that I went was staying in my room where nothing interesting happened, so when I went outside, I was surrounded by hundreds of random things that social people take for granted. But to me, they were interesting and had to be tweeted about. So I had a hard time at first with the found poem, I was trying to find this profound thing that would make an amazing poem. But it turns out that the theme was as simple as the weather. My fascination with the weather seemed boring at first, but when I examined that I examined myself and realized that I was so obsessed with things that I saw outside because I don’t allow myself to leave my room very often. Instead of trying to fight my nervousness around strangers, I give in to it and stay inside. So doing the research, I guess you’d call it, for the poem I also researched myself. That’s reflective or reflexive…I get them confused.
Web writing
I’ve always looked at blogging as a diary that’s open to the public, which means that I write down my thoughts, like I would do in a journal, but I’m incredibly self-conscious about every word I write, especially for the blog for this class. I knew that, at the very least, a few of my fellow students would skim through the blog post and write a vague comment to fulfill a course requirement. But I also knew that my teacher would be reading my blogs and that was a little nerve-wracking because sometimes I say things I probably shouldn’t, it’s just that I feel that they need to be said. It’s an unspoken rule that you’re supposed to kiss your teacher’s ass, but that’s not how I operate. If it’s the truth, than it’s true and I write it down, perhaps with language that’s more colorful than necessary, but nevertheless it’s the truth. In the beginning of the semester, I thought that might get me into trouble, but now I’m hoping that my winning personality is earning me some brownie points for making my blog interesting to read. And that's why the course blog was so weird for me to write because the posts were based off of the readings we had to do over the course of the semester. So it was a weird combination of professionalism and my writing style and tone. I'm not sure if that mixed well, but it's too late to do anything about it now. I like it, though.
I think it makes sense to be conscious about what you put on the internet, not just on blog sites, but anywhere, because I hear that it never goes away even after you delete it. That's really creepy. So you have to watch what you say because a lot of people are going to see what you wrote for a really long time. After this class, I'll probably forget I have a weebly site, but it'll still be up here. How many eyes will look at this sentence?
Collaborative writing
We did our project hierarchically, there was a leader of sorts who tweeted everyone about meeting up before/after class and divided up the different sections of the project to the group members. It didn’t feel like a dictatorship, though, because we all naturally fell into line behind Dom, because he liked to talk the most and had the most confidence in the project from the beginning. When our first brainstorm fell through, everyone got discouraged and I believe it was Dom who came up with the next idea. I can’t really remember because I didn’t keep up with my blog, which, in hindsight, was unhelpful, even though we were told that from day one….
I didn’t mind collaborative writing for this particular project because it was such a large endeavor that one person could only accomplish if they had the whole semester and not just one month to do it. But usually I don’t like to collaborate with other writers, I like to claim all words as my own, I don’t like people touching my things. It was helpful to write this paper collaboratively because my group was in a state of perpetual confusion from the first day when we brainstormed. When we were asked about what we were doing, we said “Uhhhhhhh…..” We all had our separate parts we played to contribute to the project, so we all had different things up on our separate websites. Froy might copy and paste from me, change a few sentences, and then maybe Laura might copy and paste from Froy. So everything was similar but different. That’s why we have the disclaimer “sites may vary” because of the way we chose to write the paper. Doing this project showed me that I can work with other people to write, I just prefer not to. We ended up writing our own things anyway.
Writing as Exploration and Inquiry
I based my Twitterive off of my found poem, which I've said before was the beginning of my exploration of myself. My Twitterive was a continuation of that exploration in the form of a FICTIONAL story about a girl who murders everybody so she can be alone. I'm not about to change my lone wolf ways, but this assignment made me conscious of my behavior and made me realize that it has an effect on my writing because I tend to write stories with a very small cast of characters, one person at the least, five at the most, and they are usually detached in some way, either mentally or physically, metaphorically or literally. I noticed that about my stories before, but I never bothered to think why.
Seeing other people's Twitterives in class didn't affect me, I was confident about where my story was supposed to go and what message I would have my character say through her actions and thoughts. To repeat myself again, I don't like to be influenced by other people (except the teacher because he hands out the grades), so everyone else's presentation was simply interesting to look at what other people did. I wrote down the suggestions they were saying to me so they wouldn't be offended, but in the end, it's up to me what I add or delete. It will be done, I'm not that full of myself to think that my story is perfect, but I like to try and work my problems out on my own. It makes the final result that much more satisfying.
This all seems like a monologue about myself and not a direct answer to "how has this class impacted your writing." But I feel that a person can't be a good writer if they don't know why they write. I'm a Junior and you'd think I'd know by now why I write, but that's not true. My creative writing classes helped me figure out what I love to write but not why.