End-of-Year Reflection

Perhaps the worst trait a writer can have is an ego. In the beginning, it's seems like an advantage- you're more willing to share your work, more confident in starting work on pieces, and more motivated to work. I've never had problems with deadlines- my Independent Writing Project had a first draft on April 27th, and was mostly done by the 24th. Once you've written your piece, though, it becomes a burden of ridiculous proportions.

Fig. 1: From my progress blog: The ending is finally finished

I think a lot of my classmates suffer from a lack of ego. I suffer from the opposite. An ego manifests itself in many forms, and the first you see is complacency. I can honestly say that complacency crashed my first two pieces. They were pretty solid to begin with (or maybe that's just the ego at work again) but they never got any better. I got pretty reasonable reviews from my class. After I was told that they were "OK," both my poem and my non-fiction piece never changed again. Even worse, in the case of the poem, I was forced to make changes when I was asked to present a second draft. Since I hadn't put much- or any- thought into changes, my poem got much, much worse.
Non-fiction piece: Check out the revision history. The first section hasn't changed since it was first written.
Poem: The first draft is included beneath the second. There's a full extra section tacked on at the end, and it ruins the piece.
After that, an ego manifests in an unwillingness to accept help from others. During the half-class whip-share sessions, I'll admit I still consider a lot of the advice I received from my classmates pretty poor, mainly because a lot people were forced to share when they really didn't have any good ideas. But a lot of the one-to-one reviews, especially from Aaron, George, and Kathy, were of excellent quality, and my anthology submission could have improved substantially with their help. And I really didn't act on the advice- I made half-hearted changes, but never took the risk of great change.
That all went bottom-up when I got slapped in the face with a C+ review from Dr. Clark. I had received very little in the way of truly negative reviews before then, because my story was superficially very pleasing to read while the underlying story was weak.

Fig. 2: Cruel but true

I made some drastic changes after that, first using Dr. Clark's advice, and then with Aaron's. Even though it was meant to be just line edits, Aaron and I nearly rewrote the piece together. The piece dropped from 2,500 to 2,000 words in the span of nearly two hours of work. It's still a bit embarrassing that my hand had to be forced before I made a change.
I remember Robin Hemley gave a very detailed account of this exact problem during his talk. It's like mathematics in elementary school. You go through five years of life being told that you are just the most precious little math genius the school has ever seen. Then you find out that you're honestly pretty mediocre.
The problem is worst when your language is excellent but your storylines are weak, because then whenever someone gives your piece a quick glance and then moves on they'll tell you it's wonderful when it's really quite poor.
I'd like to say the problem got better during my Independent Writing Project, but I worry that it didn't. I can't quite tell. I asked a lot of people for advice, and tried to implement a lot of it, and I did rewrite at least the final third, and mixed up some scenes, but I worry that the amount of revision still wasn't impressive.
I heard a lot of "I hear your voice so well in this!" as usual. And it's truly an awful thing to hear, because I know that it's meant as a compliment but so often it just means "this piece is superficially good."
And that's really not a great compliment to hear, if it is a compliment at all.

April 23rd Work Reflection

On April 23rd most of my work was put into my independent project.

I did help out somewhat with arranging a date for our Creative Writing Club. See, here it is on our schedule-

Admittedly we're not entirely sure what to do on the day, but Jack and Shyla and I threw some ideas around. Right now we're planning to follow standard CWC 30-minute writing prompt style, but that may change as we get bigger and better ideas.

Having finished outlining my independent piece, I have begun making rough sketches of individual scenes and seeing how they might fit together.

At present I've got about five pages of content, with the first third or so of the story pretty well done and the conclusion starting to come together.

ATWS Reflection on Contributions to the Good of this Book

            I began this project as a lowly designer assigned the job of typesetting a book. Autonomy in this role was pretty extensive- mostly, I just scratched something together, flipped my computer around, and asked the other designers, “Do you like it?”

            And by default they’d just go, “Yeah, I like that,”

            So then I’d think twice about the design and remake it. Then I’d show the new design and people would say, “Yeah, I like that, maybe move the title half a centimeter up.”

            So I did, and that was that.

            But since I was now the only person holding the formatting, I got roped into handling the manuscript. I won’t say it was a very difficult task. Mostly it was just clerical page-shuffling, and though there was a lot of work, I didn’t really have to put much thought into it. People would pass me their stories, I’d format them, people would give me a story order, I’d rearrange the stories, people would demand each story formatted on an individual document, and I’d roll it out in an hour or so. I was nicknamed the Clark Clerk.

            And I’m sure my work, however menial, was helpful to a lot of other people. Alana needed me to modify the formatting of her piece. Aaron needed me to put all our copy editing annotations in the book. Bobby and Kathy wanted me to change all instances of their name to the more casual form. I was the secretary, and everything went through me.

             But I’d prefer to be credited with helping with the small odds and ends that we all chipped in to solve. Whenever something came up that wasn’t on any group’s to do list, we just grabbed whoever was available and asked them to write a blurb, or arrange the author biographies, or resolve a question in grammar. Whenever I was on site and finished with whatever I was explicitly responsible for, I’d be working on refining copy edits, helping people write their author bios, or just trying out some sentences for the back cover. Those are the matters that needed thought, inspiration, and teamwork. All this secretarial stuff was just my assigned work. The odds and ends were the real challenge.

            Sometimes the odds and ends were downright nightmarish. You already saw what a mess we went through to get Word to export right. But that certainly wasn’t the only problem Word gave us- for one thing, we couldn’t get the page numbers to function. Word can organize documents into sections, it’s just that nobody knows that, so nobody tells Word where the sections are. Of course, if you want different styles of page numbering in different parts of the book, you need to divide each part into sections. I had to learn pretty advanced level Word in order to get this piece to function, and even now, the Word doc is a stew of poor formatting, sections I don’t know how to remove, and haphazard eyeballing of margins.

            I’ll admit I did from time to time seek problems where there were none. We were all desperately afraid of some small error in the book being missed by editing, so some of us became brutally perfectionist. Every single change to grammar had to be triple-checked. Every piece was run through over and over until everything checked out. We went through three runs of copy editing and countless book-wide checks for common errors, and I’ll admit I made these checks drag on far beyond what was reasonable in search of consensus on perfect grammar. Given we were copy editing on the day before due date, that maybe wasn’t productive.

ATWS Final Draft Reflection

I won't claim that "The Other Cheek Doctrine" changed that much from its initial writing to its end. The first five paragraphs, in fact, received nothing but a grammar check-up from when it was first written in 2017 to several months later. I've seen students rewrite their pieces again and again, scramble their paragraphs like breakfast eggs, and vaporise half their piece three days from deadline. And I won't claim I've done anything comparable.
From its first draft "The Other Cheek Doctrine" has retained the same tone and the same basic plot. When it was first made it had (due to a misunderstanding of length requirements) five thousand words and was constantly growing. When the real word count dropped like a guillotine onto the piece, it was simply a matter of splicing the most brutal monologue of the piece together with the first 1500 words, and then playing with the wording to produce a neat transition. That wasn't much of a challenge, as the piece was always non-chronological and leapt from scene to scene in a heartbeat. The stitches in this new piece were remarkably invisible, and I was amazed at what an improvement this cut-down had made. And from then on the plot was ironclad- unlike the constantly morphing 5000 word text, this new edition held its form like stone.

The Original Other Cheek Doctrine - Orville and the Rock - was a lot of humour, and not a lot of actual meaning. So we cut out just the bits with meaning and mixed them with the best humour.

What did I learn from workshop? Firstly, there were plot holes, and some dissent toward certain lines, but these were easy fixes. Then there was the other big problem- people often found the meaning of the piece hard to guess. That did take some cleaning up. The most obvious improvement was the addition of this paragraph to the monologue:
     "And everybody loved it. They loved it more than you can imagine. They loved it like the waves love the moon and the lions love their manes and the goats love the grass. They sat here and loved it. They sat and chewed coffee that tasted of rain, admired uniforms that looked like bat skin, and shattered against the swords of an enemy just as rapturous as Orville’s own unit. And they did nothing about anything. Like goats and lions and waves. But even goats avoid muddy grass, and lions preen their fur, and the waves grind down the stones they strike. The Rock just grinned and danced and said stupid things."
But besides that it included hundreds of small but important improvements to clarity, like the change of “But isn’t it nice how the cold gets into your muscles and stings like that? Like after a long run? And you’re wrapped in this warm coat so your chest is almost too hot but it still feels good ‘cause your hands are so cold?” to “Well, I like the cold. I was once assigned to a camp in the middle of the desert. It was so hot, three people died of heat stroke every week. No joke! Imagine dying from being too hot. Ha! Ha! Well, I think it’s pretty funny."
That's really the nature of all the changes to my piece- small but consistent modifications for clarity and understanding. Change came gradually.

Small cuts, replacements, etc. was the name of the game.

The Other Cheek Doctrine constantly fluctuated in length as new paragraphs were added to point more strongly toward the theme, and sentences were re-written or chopped to bring the word count back within reason. During the class-long revision session in February, the word count jumped from 2000 to 2400 and back down to 2150 in the span of an hour.
How often did edits occur? 1-3 times a week. During those revisions I'd usually read the whole piece over and simply write sentences that sounded wrong a second time. Then I'd come back a few days later and repeat the process. The piece was constantly being purified, refined, and honed. But it never truly changed. It was in essence always the same story.

A consistent editing schedule, though not a huge deal changed during these days.

Would I have conducted this process differently a second time? Of course! I'd have made much bigger strides if, instead of just tinkering with sentence structure, I had written new paragraphs and mixed up the old ones in a constant cycle. But I'm not really sure how I'd go about that. Frankly, one of my key issues is that I never really knew how to change my piece. I was given plenty of advice about what was wrong with my piece but never really understood how to fix my issues. I knew I wanted it to be clearer, I just didn't know how to make it clearer without the whole thing sounding spoon-fed.
Maybe I'm just suffering under the tyranny of the first draft. Maybe the changes would actually have crashed my piece and I was much better off just honing the one I had. I really don't know, but I'll try to be a lot more experimental next time around.
I dunno. Maybe it'll work. Maybe it won't. We'll see.

23 Feb Progress

What was my goal?
Cut two hundred words from my piece. Maybe help some people out along the way.
Did it happen?
Yes.
Even though the actual size reduction wasn't enormous, just cutting out some sketchy lines and re-writing them has made a decent improvement to the feel of the piece. I'll admit, the changes that went down weren't huge, and particularly the final monologue sections saw almost no edits at all. But the introduction and first few paragraphs were pared down by a hundred words or so.
Revisions to my introduction. You can see that the meaning of the sentences hasn't really changed, but they've been shortened and re-arranged.

Creative Non-fiction Workshop Reflection

Advice I gained from conferencing:
Don't make your piece too confusing.
Don't make your piece too unbalanced. If you're trying to show a conflict, show equal amounts of both sides of the argument throughout the story.
Introduce recurrent characters early.
Everything should link together, and the links shouldn't be too well hidden.
Cut ANYTHING unnecessary to the central story.
Keep a consistent voice.

Reflections on my piece:
I wrote the Grandfather Clock in a series of short, half-hour allotments, usually finishing a single section and then waiting nearly a day before moving on. Did it work? To some extent- it did, of course, make for a very divided essay, with parts that were connected only by moral or topic rather than any chronological movement. That led to some confusion, but the style was mostly consistent.
A lot of people stood against the non-chronological nature of my writing- how it really never told a story, or rather, never told a conflict. The conflict is in the underlying writing, the conflict between getting over old things or clinging to them because they hold sentimental value, and it never appeared in a single section. Hemley found it interesting.
I'm most proud of the somewhat snarky style that appears in the beginning and to a lesser degree the sections with my grandfather. Sadly, I still have trouble capturing emotional bits- conveying pain or conflict. Maybe you just say what the conflict is, and readers, if the conflict is difficult enough, will just feel the turmoil for themselves?
I broke with the prompt. I'll be completely honest- while the deck plan of Bjoern is a physical object in my grandfather's house, none of the other plans are physically in my possession. I had used most of them before for historical research, if that counts.
A lot of people disliked these plans, saying that they were unconnected to the sections below them. After the class conference, I was planning to dump them and replace them with ships that hadn't sunk- ships that were outdated beyond imagining but were kept afloat at great expense for entertainment value, like HMS Victory and so on. But Hemley seemed against that- he claimed that the meaning was discernible, and that things didn't always need to be as clear as windex-wiped glass. I'm tempted to do it.
I think more outlining was needed. While the individual sections didn't suffer, the overall organization did. Although writing and then re-arranging the sections afterward was and is possible, that's a trait exclusive to my work. It's so non-chronological that you could flip the second and fifth section and no one would notice.
Still, it's been interesting to write such a strangely laid out work. Even though it might not be perfectly strung together, there are definitely sections of impressive quality, and I'd very much like to figure out how I made them. That's just memory for you.

Reflections of the discussion:
Understanding the advice given to you from twelve people at the same time is a pretty hellish experience. Metaphors of needles in haystacks, or needles in stacks of needles, or stacks of needles in larger stacks of needles, all come to mind. Our instructions were incoherent and you had to feel out patterns in advice in order to understand it. Often that advice was imprecise, conflicting, or just flat out wrong.
Still, it can be useful to get a feel at how people see your work. Oftentimes how your piece is perceived is more useful than what people say you should change. Though it may sound arrogant the person who best knows how to continue your story is you.
I think one-on-one conferences are a lot more valuable, especially when you do them with someone who knows their stuff. Individual people can be remarkably clear about what they don't like about your piece. People in large groups give you general feelings, which, admittedly, are probably more accurate, but they're often veeery tough to respond to.

Decision Making Process Reflection

            The decision making process quickly spirals out of control. When everyone can speak their suggestions freely you get a wildly unstructured duel with no clear winner. I’m sure that a debate wasn’t what was intended to happen, but it’s what we got. That's really a problem, as deciding on three advantages become wildly difficult. The whole thing stops being about deciding on the pros and cons and all about deciding which genre is the best, and since no one can win that fight a lot of time gets wasted.

            After the two presentations we were given all of thirty seconds to talk amongst ourselves, so really the only debate we had was the unstructured debate amongst our groups.

Reading Reflections

Text	Characteristics of as a Mentor Text
Sample: “The Elephant Vanishes” By Haruki Murakami	Lure readers in with an impossible situation, a mystery Subtly align the impossible situation with an actuality in the narrator’s life Craft a narrator that has inside information on the mystery that is slowly revealed Use simple, straightforward style and diction Incorporate action in dialogue Detail the change that occurs in the narrator End magically by tying the mystery to the actuality
“A Gift from Somewhere” By Ama Ato Aidoo	Religion & blind belief When belief works out, people believe in it Being a charlatan and trying to maintain the illusion of your spells working.
“The Story of the Lizard who Had the Habit of Dining On His Wives” By Eduardo Galeano	Allegorical nonsense story Shock Ending Patterning off of traditional fairy tales- the story of true love and the princess and so on. Gender Relationships- Men Usually Dine on Women, but Women are just as capable of dining on men. Power through inheritance
“The Keeper of the Virgins” Hanan Al-Shaykh	A different outlook on being excluded from society- accepted, but no included Religion and symbolism Obsession with a particular, but ultimately unimportant area. Disrespecting law.

“The Pain Scale” By Eula Bliss	Short, cutting paragraphs, often no more than two or three sentences. Mathematics and history paragraphs combine with theological and mythological discussion combine with personal allegory. Visual aids and cues.
“Kissing” Anthony Farrington	“Fun facts”, quotes, and so on, in the sidebars give a greater understanding of the work. Light hearted tone on the memoir, less so on the sidebars, which are often “Words of Wisdom” with little basis in reality.

Workshop Reflection 2

1. The most important thing I learned from workshopping is that things are rarely as clear for others as they are for you. While people could often recognize the central idea or theme of my work and a few of the more subtle details, they often recognized ideas that I had not intended. This brings up an interesting question- should people be allowed to develop now and different interpretations of your work, or should you provide clarity to keep them on the intended track?
2. I learned primarily that subtle nuances are often recognized by other people. Though they are quick to see patterns where none were intended, it wouldn't be smart to underestimate how good they are at seeing patterns that you did intend. People aren't stupid, you know. Keeping things clear isn't always necessary.
3. I must remember to see things from others perspectives. Poems, or books, make a lot of sense when they are explained and when they are analyzed, but when they are read for the first time they rarely convey the intended meaning. This is not always a bad thing, most works should be left somewhat open to interpretation and imagination. But it is important to remember the difference between what the author sees and what the reader sees.

Workshop Reflection

I think a big part of poetry is finding meaning from ambiguity. By allowing people to explain their thoughts on a piece you get an excellent idea of how thoughts move- what ideas are obvious and which are not. I think the first few minutes of discussion were the most useful, as it showed people's original thoughts before taking ideas from others, so in those first few minutes you get a perfect glance into precisely what you work looks like from the outside.
I personally think that twenty minutes is ultimately unnecessary. The first five-ten minutes are sufficient to capture ideas but not long enough that the ideas become too convoluted. The initial ideas are always the most accurate.

Decision Making Blog Post

     Reflect on how your team chose its mentor text. How do you feel the discussion went? How do you feel about your own role in the decision? Explain one way the decision could have gone better.

     I think this was a very fast decision. We selected a poem that many liked, confirmed that no one had any serious complaints about it, and then gave it a stamp of approval, without considering many of the other choices to a serious degree. I won't say it was a bad choice, it's just that, well, it wasn't thought about for very long.
     I'd also like to question our decision to expect one candidate poem from each member of the group. Rather than letting people suggest as we went along, asking for fifteen different poems meant there were too many poems to consider, which, of course, further reduced our time to decide.
     I'll admit, I'm somewhat poor at contribution to group discussion.