Narrative Project Preface: My past experience with writing narratives has been pretty solid. I like to use my creative side and I’m a good story teller as well as putting it down on paper which is evident in my blog #3 post A letter to my Author-Self. In high school we often focused on writing and I grew to enjoy writing and found it fun to be able to put your thoughts into words. Whether it’s a real story or I’m making it up, I enjoy everything about writing. When writing about myself I find that to be the easiest because I know myself best and I figure out more about myself when I’m writing and having to think about past experiences. As far as my identity goes I consider myself and most of my writing to be entertaining, funny, and easily readable. I have found my writing to be successful a lot of times when I just act like myself and when I continue writing and wait to clean everything up later. With my English Composition I class, I plan on being able to get more diverse with my writing and be able to explore different paths and also take risks that I wouldn’t normally take.
In my blog #4 post, Writing Process Roundtable, we created our own scene at a roundtable and came up with different dialogue to make a conversation that could've happened. I enjoyed this assignment because I could write about what I wanted to, and I could get creative and make up different events to make for a good story. I feel like I am at my best when I can write about whatever I want to, because that's when I get most creative.
Our next blog post helped me learn how to write dialogue and took me back a few years to relive a moment in my life. In blog #5, Composing an Emotional Scene with Dialogue and Symbolism, we travelled back to a time in our life where we experienced something very emotional to us. This wasn't the happiest form of writing for me, but I enjoyed it because I was uncomfortable while writing about it. It forced me to go back to the moment when my good friend passed away in high school, and I feel like this will help my writing in the future to become a more open, and more emotional writer.
Then, following blog #5, in blog #6 we had to write a counterfactual to our emotional scene in the previous blog post. I found this to be difficult because it was hard trying to imagine anything different and still possibly having my friend here, if things were different. This blog post, Telling Myself a Different story: A Memoir Counterfactual, was interesting to write about and see how anything could've been different, but I tried my best at it and I think I came up with a well written story. These posts where we write a lot of dialogue are helping me in the long run become a better writer and learning how to step out of my comfort zone.
Drafts Here I will publish drafts of my memoir: Draft #1