So with the first couple of weeks of class having passed, and being in the middle of first semester, I am already knee deep in homework, but as you can imagine, there are times (such as now) when I am able to pull away and do something for myself. This would be one of those things.
In Creative Writing class we are talking a lot about being true to ourselves, and how sometimes we have to let life interrupt our writing. Sometimes we have to put more life into our writing, such as having a character use the bathroom, or sneeze... I can send you the reflection essay if you want to read it to better understand what I am talking about. I got an A on it... so it must have made sense.
Mostly when we are discussing the idea of "self" in relation to our writing and the reader, we use the word "I," a lot and then in turn use the word, "you" to call someone out, or engage the reader. However, most of this is used in poetry... not twenty page long stories.
Which brings me to my thought process for writing this.
As a Creative Writing major, and someone who has known that they wanted to write since eighth grade I know personally, that many times writers stick to what they know. From there we will deviate, we will make up some events here and there, we will imagine the "what if's" and we have even had an assignment where we had to write a truth, and write about it until it becomes a lie. Then we had to do the same for a lie, write about it until it becomes a truth. As you may have concluded, we write the truth a lot, but we also know how to lie on paper. We know how to give good plots, and we know how to develop the characters we need. Whether we develop them over twenty pages or two sentences, we can do it.
That being said, I started to write a story back in February. It was for my Creative Writing: Fiction Workshop. Through a series of "no's" from my professor, she finally took me aside and said, "simply tell the story..." So I took out all of the big parts to it, and left it simple.
Where it left me was characters who would essentially mimic my friends, my team, and people who I considered family. I knew how I wanted the story to end, so I sent in the ending to my professor for my final, but I never posted part three to the blog.
Something wasn't right about the ending, and I wasn't going to post it until I was happy with it.
Upon re-reading I started re-writing, I started to add even more, and from the revision processes to finally ending the story in a satisfying manor I realized a couple of things.
1.) I was extremely attached to these characters - so much so that I knew I couldn't stick to what had happened in reality as the end, but I could not leave them all happy and cheerful at the end, because it would not have been realistic with their set of circumstances.
2.) I thought that these characters were the real people - It had seemed as though I had captured them so well that it was a reflection of the actual people, or maybe I had been so consumed in the story that it felt that way. It felt like if someone called me by the main characters name, I would answer. I started calling my friends by the wrong name, so essentially I felt like everything that happened to the main characters had always been, if it had not already happened in real life, could have happened between them in real life, had the human versions made different choices.
It wasn't until this morning when a conversation from last night really triggered this train of thought.
In the conversation last night, Mason referred to my story, and in that referred to the character as himself. Mistakingly thinking that him and the character were the same person, from there we continued our conversation, and a similar conversation had happened in the story, but in a completely different way.
So when I woke up this morning, I couldn't shake any of the conversation and how it related to the story, and the story to our lives, and our lives to the characters lives. Something wasn't right with the way that we were thinking about the characters and the story.
And here is where we were mistaken.
I will never be Callie, she is a little bit high strung, she tells people how she feels straight up, and from what it appears, her love language is completely different from mine. She responds to physical touch well, I don't, unless I'm completely comfortable with the person... if that's the case, bring it on. When she got frustrated with Daniel in the hallway at Nationals she blew off steam, she yelled at him, and at the same time talked herself in circles right in front of him. That didn't happen, when we repeated the real-life version of that conversation. There was no yelling, or talking myself in circles. We asked questions and gave honest, and calm, answers. Granted, we were in a less intense environment than the characters were at the time... but still, completely different reactions. Completely different people.
In those situations that Callie was put in, I would not have responded to the physical touch well, and when I was having that conversation last night, I nodded, and rationally listened to everything Mason had to say, trying to defend my stance on things before he interrupted.
Which leads me to my second conclusion.
Mason will never be Daniel, or vise versa. Mason said it himself, he's more hard headed, he knows who he is, and nothing will change that, whereas the character who is based off of him, Daniel is not. Daniel is hard headed, but not as much as Mason.
Daniel listened to Callie, and I'm not saying that Mason does not, but Daniel listened, and asked his questions without interrupting, whereas Mason was constantly interrupting. I'm not really sure if we ever finished a whole subject of our conversation... or in fact I don't think I ever got around to fully answering one of his questions because he would interrupt me with a thought or another question. Which is fine, but that is not who Daniel is in the story.
That and Daniel and Mason's love languages are completely different, and it's obvious there too.
Clearly the characters are based off of us, but they will never be us, and we will never be them. I am aware that it is hard to comprehend, and that is where as Creative Writing Majors, our homework and our jobs get difficult. It's not hard in the sense that we can't do it, it is hard in the sense that sometimes our writing is too real to us. Sometimes it gets confusing between what happened in our poem or in our story and what happened in real life.
And the biggest thing I learned is that the characters... sometimes they accidentally become their own people. Maybe a better version of ourselves, or an alternate version, but we are not them, and we will never be.
I think that is all I wanted to say...
So back to homework and bones....
In Creative Writing class we are talking a lot about being true to ourselves, and how sometimes we have to let life interrupt our writing. Sometimes we have to put more life into our writing, such as having a character use the bathroom, or sneeze... I can send you the reflection essay if you want to read it to better understand what I am talking about. I got an A on it... so it must have made sense.
Mostly when we are discussing the idea of "self" in relation to our writing and the reader, we use the word "I," a lot and then in turn use the word, "you" to call someone out, or engage the reader. However, most of this is used in poetry... not twenty page long stories.
Which brings me to my thought process for writing this.
As a Creative Writing major, and someone who has known that they wanted to write since eighth grade I know personally, that many times writers stick to what they know. From there we will deviate, we will make up some events here and there, we will imagine the "what if's" and we have even had an assignment where we had to write a truth, and write about it until it becomes a lie. Then we had to do the same for a lie, write about it until it becomes a truth. As you may have concluded, we write the truth a lot, but we also know how to lie on paper. We know how to give good plots, and we know how to develop the characters we need. Whether we develop them over twenty pages or two sentences, we can do it.
That being said, I started to write a story back in February. It was for my Creative Writing: Fiction Workshop. Through a series of "no's" from my professor, she finally took me aside and said, "simply tell the story..." So I took out all of the big parts to it, and left it simple.
Where it left me was characters who would essentially mimic my friends, my team, and people who I considered family. I knew how I wanted the story to end, so I sent in the ending to my professor for my final, but I never posted part three to the blog.
Something wasn't right about the ending, and I wasn't going to post it until I was happy with it.
Upon re-reading I started re-writing, I started to add even more, and from the revision processes to finally ending the story in a satisfying manor I realized a couple of things.
1.) I was extremely attached to these characters - so much so that I knew I couldn't stick to what had happened in reality as the end, but I could not leave them all happy and cheerful at the end, because it would not have been realistic with their set of circumstances.
2.) I thought that these characters were the real people - It had seemed as though I had captured them so well that it was a reflection of the actual people, or maybe I had been so consumed in the story that it felt that way. It felt like if someone called me by the main characters name, I would answer. I started calling my friends by the wrong name, so essentially I felt like everything that happened to the main characters had always been, if it had not already happened in real life, could have happened between them in real life, had the human versions made different choices.
It wasn't until this morning when a conversation from last night really triggered this train of thought.
In the conversation last night, Mason referred to my story, and in that referred to the character as himself. Mistakingly thinking that him and the character were the same person, from there we continued our conversation, and a similar conversation had happened in the story, but in a completely different way.
So when I woke up this morning, I couldn't shake any of the conversation and how it related to the story, and the story to our lives, and our lives to the characters lives. Something wasn't right with the way that we were thinking about the characters and the story.
And here is where we were mistaken.
I will never be Callie, she is a little bit high strung, she tells people how she feels straight up, and from what it appears, her love language is completely different from mine. She responds to physical touch well, I don't, unless I'm completely comfortable with the person... if that's the case, bring it on. When she got frustrated with Daniel in the hallway at Nationals she blew off steam, she yelled at him, and at the same time talked herself in circles right in front of him. That didn't happen, when we repeated the real-life version of that conversation. There was no yelling, or talking myself in circles. We asked questions and gave honest, and calm, answers. Granted, we were in a less intense environment than the characters were at the time... but still, completely different reactions. Completely different people.
In those situations that Callie was put in, I would not have responded to the physical touch well, and when I was having that conversation last night, I nodded, and rationally listened to everything Mason had to say, trying to defend my stance on things before he interrupted.
Which leads me to my second conclusion.
Mason will never be Daniel, or vise versa. Mason said it himself, he's more hard headed, he knows who he is, and nothing will change that, whereas the character who is based off of him, Daniel is not. Daniel is hard headed, but not as much as Mason.
Daniel listened to Callie, and I'm not saying that Mason does not, but Daniel listened, and asked his questions without interrupting, whereas Mason was constantly interrupting. I'm not really sure if we ever finished a whole subject of our conversation... or in fact I don't think I ever got around to fully answering one of his questions because he would interrupt me with a thought or another question. Which is fine, but that is not who Daniel is in the story.
That and Daniel and Mason's love languages are completely different, and it's obvious there too.
Clearly the characters are based off of us, but they will never be us, and we will never be them. I am aware that it is hard to comprehend, and that is where as Creative Writing Majors, our homework and our jobs get difficult. It's not hard in the sense that we can't do it, it is hard in the sense that sometimes our writing is too real to us. Sometimes it gets confusing between what happened in our poem or in our story and what happened in real life.
And the biggest thing I learned is that the characters... sometimes they accidentally become their own people. Maybe a better version of ourselves, or an alternate version, but we are not them, and we will never be.
I think that is all I wanted to say...
So back to homework and bones....
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