Essay Week 13 Me, My Editor, and the Work

     When writing poetry I have always found it is best to not force the poem. By this I mean that I am unable to make myself be creative. For this class I chose to write poetry for my storybook, and this was a process that some weeks went rather quickly and other weeks extremely slow. For my first poem I thought about my topic for about two weeks. Throughout my day I would say phrases in my head and slowly but surely the poem was completed before I even sat down to type it out. This is a very natural way for me to write poetry. So the first poem in my storybook actually happened in a very organic way. My second poem, Sita’s Sonnet, didn’t come to me as easy. This was a poem that I struggled with more than any of the other poems. I knew what I wanted to say, but because I wrote it in the form of a sonnet, I was faced with many challenges that I did not face when writing the other poems. One of the challenges was trying to write a poem that told the story of Sita without breaking the meter. It is an extremely confining form that I chose to write this poem in, but I feel as if it was my most creative of the poems because I was forced to choose words that gave the most information. The third poem, and I feel the best of the group, was the easiest to write. There was no plan to writing this poem, I sat down at the computer and started typing and it just came out. My final poem and my least favorite of the group presented little challenge in writing. I feel that this is my least creative poem, though this poem may be the easiest to read by someone that is not familiar to the story.

     Just because these poems were typed up and turned in did not mean that the work on them was finished. The most horrible part of the writing process was just beginning, the revising process. I have always found this part of the process to be the most alcohol inducing of them all. When a writer completes a piece of work there is a great deal of pride that they feel. They feel this because writing is a journey. For most of my work this is not something that I just sat down and typed up. Instead it is something that has been floating around in my head for a good deal of time, and even though I know it can be improved, I still feel proud and extremely protective of the work. This is why there is always a bunch of anxiety when you send in your work to your editor. This is for a couple of reasons. First, you want them to like the work. No matter what someone says, they really do want to be recognized as being gifted and one of the ways that they receive this from other people is through compliments. Second, as a writer you have a vision and this is your vision alone, so to have someone else comment of what they think your vision is can be frustrating. Finally, as a writer I hate to change my work. Still, it is a necessary step in the writing process. So even though receiving notes from your editor can drive you to drink, cuss, and throw your computer out the window, I have found it is best to stop, take a deep breath, and realize a few things. First, the editor is a fan of your work. If they did not like your work their only note to you would be, “this is horrible, delete it and start over.” Though they don’t tell you they like the work, the fact that they are taking the time to read it and give you honest thoughts on the work is proof that they like the work. Second, the editor wants your vision to be seen by people as much as you do, so their notes are an objective way of being able to share your vision with everyone else. Their objectivity is what is most important because as a writer you lack objectivity because you are emotionally attached to the work. Finally, they themselves are often writers so they know how much work goes into the writing. They know that if you are not pushed to make these changes you will regret it later when you revisit the work, because you will have gained some objectivity and will see that you could have done better. The most important thing for me to remember as a writer is that this is not a journey I am on alone. This journey involves myself, my editor, and the work and without the editor and I working together the work will suffer. As a writer I have to be able to surrender my ego and realize that the editor and I are working together to make the work the best possible version of itself.

Essay Week 11 Positive and Negative Assignment

Each week we have a reading assignment for this class and each week the entire class reads the same story. We post notes on our blog pages and then we follow it with a storytelling assignment. This week however, we were allowed to choose which story we wanted to read. This method of allowing the students to choose the story they wanted to read allowed for greater freedom, not just in exploring our interest, but in our storytelling ideas as well. This of course does present positive and negative issues in regards to the student and the assignment.

The positive of course is that this method does break up the monotony of the class. Each week because the entire class reads the same story there is little in the way of surprise and discovery when doing the storytelling response posts. This is because each student is basically rereading the story that they have just read. There are of course surprises in that each student has a different perspective on the story and that does come through in the storytelling posts, but still there is very little in the way of discovering something new about the story. This method is good because it allows each student to read a different story and then post a storytelling post based on that the new story. Which in turn allows another student to discover a new story and become interested in that new story.

One of the negatives about this assignment is the lack of direction due to the amount of options. The assignment page is like a buffet of topics, so simply choosing a story to read becomes an issue in itself. This may not seem like it could cause a problem, but when looking at the topics to choose from then opening the assignment link the student is then left with even more choices to choose from, so trying to simply narrow down what to read can be time consuming. Once this is figured out by the student then the issue becomes the length of each story. Because the stories are short, when it comes time to choose a topic for a storytelling post the student must narrow down their topic so that they can retell one of the stories. A student may enjoy having a set reading and storytelling topic and sometimes too much choice can be a bad thing.

Still the positives of this assignment do outweigh the negatives. Though the assignment does break from the format by allowing the student to choose the assignment topic, it also allows the reader to remain in the structure of the class by offering the option to do an assigned reading on the current class topic. By adding this element of choice, the class is injected with new creative subjects that work toward opening the other students up to different stories and possibly peaking there interests to literature outside of the class. So while there are possible negatives with this assignment, there are definite positives with this assignment that add to the strength of the class.