Tuesday, January 19, 2010

English Final

What have you learned from your struggles with writer's block? Why do you tend to get stuck? How do you tend to get unstuck? Notice any patterns? Writer's block is not a problem for me, it’s a lifestyle. I write and write, the ideas dripping out of my head like a leaky faucet. And then, all of a sudden, some jerk calls the plumber. I don't know why it happens. I had a few ideas at the beginning of the year, but since then I've moved away from single posts, and began posting parts of stories that I've written. I really like writing stories, but I could never make a living off of it because I never finish. I create a whole world, building it and thinking about it all the time. I plan everything out in my head. And at that point, I can’t write anymore. I get bored; not with the story, but with writing it. I become perfectly content to keep the ideas in my head. It all there, I just can't write about it. This is definitely a pattern, because it’s happened with all but one of my stories. Now all I have to do is find a way to break the pattern. Another thing that dams up my creative flow is typing. I can type as well as the average person, but I hate doing it. I find it nearly impossible to think of new ideas while sitting in front of a computer screen. There's just something about the glare of the computer screen, and the robotic motion of typing that really kills my vibe. Longhand is just easier for me. It flows, and even though I don't particularly like my handwriting, there’s something strangely satisfying about seeing it fill up a page of notebook paper. So, when I get stuck writing on the computer, the easiest way to get unstuck is to step back, go to my room, and write in one of my notebooks. Another way I get unstuck, while writing, is by moving on to a different story. I have five going right now, so if I ever run out of words for one, I shift to the next one. As long as a keep writing, and don't think about the story too much, my writer's block should become a considerably smaller problem.

How do the things you read influence what you write about or how you write it? I get so many of my story ideas from the books that I read. One story I'm writing, about a girl who travels between mirrors, was hugely influenced by The Water Mirror, written by Kai Meyer, because the main character travels between mirrors and captures lost souls. The souls are then dumped into the canals, and there is a myth between the Venetians that there is another Venice in the reflections on the canal water. This idea influenced another of my stories, which plays with the idea of a parallel world that can be reached through the canals of Venice, as well as other means, including the London Underground, which was in turn influenced by Un Lun Dun, written by China Meiville. My parallel world contains mythical creatures, of all types. Fairies, Elves, Tanuki, Dementors, you name it. The fictional ones, such as Dementors (Harry Potter, by J.K. Rowling), are obviously taken from other stories. But in the back of Changeling, another parallel world story written by Delia Sherman, there's a huge index of mythical creatures, explaining where they are from and what they do. I pretty much used this as reference, so the credit should go to that book, but of course the creatures, such as the Japanese Tanuki, are from all over the world. One of my stories, which is connected to my parallel world, but doesn't actually take place in it, uses Death as a main character. This idea came, in part, from The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, because Death has feelings, and doesn't resemble the Grim Reaper at all. The things I read also have a direct influence on the characters I create. I try to make them completely original, but every story has to have certain types of characters. The smart one, the funny one, etc. there has to be a balance, and I learned this from reading books.

If you used any quickwrites as blog posts, how did they change from what you wrote by hand in class to what you published on your blog? In other words, how did you go from rough draft to final draft? Explain your revision/rewriting process. As I said before, I do most of my writing by longhand. I can't get any ideas while typing, so I don’t have much of a choice otherwise. I don't like typing either, but I will admit, albeit begrudgingly, that it has its benefits. Spell check, for example. Where in the world would this generation be without spell check? Most teenagers these days don’t even capitalize their I's ( As in 'i fail at typing'), myself included. As I write this, my computer is putting squiggly red lines under them. I am a bit ashamed, but it doesn’t matter, because of spell-check. Even a piece of really abysmal writing can lookgood as long as you dot the i's and cross the t's. And besides spell check, typing actually helps me revise my writing, almost because of my near-disability with it. I have to read the same sentence over and over before I can finish typing it, and then I tend to notice things that aren’t right; sentences that don’t make sense, or bland words that could use replacing. This goes for the stories that I write, as well as the quick writes. If I compare the writing in my notebooks to the typed versions in the computer, the differences are huge. There's a lot less of it, for one thing. Sometimes I cut out whole character descriptions, events, or even characters that I don’t think are important. For example, the first chapter of one of my stories, Holding Fire, is a 20 page long description of the main characters' childhoods, told from the perspective of their guardian. It provides a lot of information, and I enjoyed writing it but as I began typing, I realized that it would be very tedious and rambling from a reader’s point of view. I haven’t edited my typed draft yet, but I don’t plan on typing any more until I cut significant parts out. While I can't create new material on the computer, transferring writing from what I wrote by hand to typed material helps me cut unimportant things out and make my overall writing much better.

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