This blog post will take my short story from blog post #5 and take a look at how it may have ended differently. It will show how my emotions would have been different, how the choices I made would be different and how the emotions of the people around me may have been different. We were assigned these two readings: Rewinding & Rewriting: The Alternate Universes in Our Heads (NPR Hidden Brain Episode), Two Views of the River (Mark Twain) and these two videos for this assignment: Kramer vs. Kramer: Action Scene (Shows/Deepens the Conflict), Kramer vs. Kramer: End-Resolution Scene We all think about our life and the choices that happen, the thoughts of why did I do this, and how would my life be different if this had happened instead. We all picture our own ‘perfect’ versions of life, but life is not perfect, in fact it is nowhere near perfect, we all deal with things we do not want to and we see how our mistakes affect the people around us. If I was to change the way that my Blog 5 post took place, I would have the story have a more happy ending.
I would have tried to convince my Granny to let Benji live a little longer to see if he got any better, or at least have him go naturally. The thought of him going through the pain, both mental and physical still hurts me. I could have also used more dialogue in my blog post to give the readers a sense of the conversations that took place, it was hard to remember what was actually said, I was more shaken up with the fact that he was going to die more than I was paying attention to what the people around me had said, and what was discussed. I could have displayed my story in a different way, I chose to open with a vague description because I felt that it was the best way to draw the readers in to my story and make them think of personal losses that they have dealt with instead of force my loss upon them.
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This blog post focuses on an emotional scene in my life. This will be used as almost a practice run for my narrative. This will take a look at how I present my scenes and feedback from anyone who comments will give me suggestions on how to better depict and describe what is going on. In Hills Like White Elephants Hemingway never tells the reader what the operation is, just as I never said how they were putting the dog down, as well as how I opened the story with a vague scene that leaves it open to the readers interpretation. Tears
… they drip cold down my face, blurring my vision, and leaving me in a blubbering mess. My nose runs as I try to make out the lifeless body beneath me. The one that once contained so much life, and happiness, bringing everyone so much joy. It is the second week in June, I have been in Ireland now for almost a week. My Granny’s dog, Benji, has not been doing well since I had got there, and he had been deteriorating rapidly in the past week. On Tuesday of that week we had taken him to the vet, there they did a biopsy. The results came back that Thursday. By that time we realized that he could no longer walk. My Granny went to the Nursing Home and brought my Granda home for the weekend to see Benji for the last time. I woke up Friday morning, to see that he was walking with a slight limp, while it was not back to normal he was making progress. It gave us hope, a false hope, because by noon he again was unable to walk. We had one or two visitors that day, compared to the usual of about 10 or so it was considerably empty. Saturday was very similar to Friday, with a hopeful morning, but by noon he had stopped walking again. My friends in the neighborhood stopped by that day to see how we were doing and provided some comedic relief as well as comfort. It was nice that they came by. Around 4 my Granny took my Granda back to the Nursing Home, I stayed behind to make sure that everything was OK with Benji. When my Granny got back we talked about what was happening and what we were going to do. Since Monday was a bank holiday and most people were off from work we decided to pray and hope that he somehow miraculously got better overnight, if not we would have the vet come down and put him out of his misery on Monday morning. Sunday was not better than Saturday. When we got up Benji had not moved and could not get up and walk. We called the vet around noon and arranged the entire operation. We called one of our neighbors Paddy and asked if he would come down on Monday to help send him off properly, he said he would. Paddy was always so good to my Granny, especially since her children no longer live in Ireland. The night before we stayed up until 1 in the morning, just laying there on the floor next to him. I started to cry and I don't think I ever really stopped until after I was back in the states. We both hugged and kissed him, gave him treats, made sure that he was comfortable, and finally after prolonging it for as long as we could said our final goodbyes and goodnight. I really wish that I had slept right there next to him. My biggest regret is not going back out there and just talking with him until I fell asleep. Monday morning finally came. I woke up and it was 11 am. “Oh no i thought, it's too late.” I got up and threw on the first thing I found and rushed into the kitchen. I looked down and I felt them, Tears This post will focus on the writing process and how it is different for each and every writer. I read these three articles Teach Writing as a Process Not a Product (Don Murray) -- introduction is not required reading, Against Vanity: In Praise of Revision (Mary Karr) , and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life | pp. 28 -34 | Short Assignments & Shitty First Drafts (Anne Lamott) and analyzed each of the writers' different processes.
Every writer has a different style of a writers’ roundtable in their mind. For example I see mine as “a class of third graders who have no interest in being at school” at times. Other times I see “my writing process as a jungle, tangled with thoughts that have no relation to writing” with “each idea flowing by faster than I can write them down leaving me concentrating on what is passed not what is coming”. To summarize, my writing could use a little bit of organization, but even though it is messy and unorthodox it still gets the job done. I like the process that all three of these authors use, but my favorite one has to be Lamott’s. I like the description that "’Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.”(Anne Lamott), it shows that no matter the size of the project you can only work one sentence at a time which she also shows in her story about her brother. “Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.”(Anne Lamott). The way Lamott describes writing is very similar to my view of writing in the way that “they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back”(Anne Lamott). Both Murray, and Karr see writing in two different parts, “In the early draft, the generative self shakes pom-poms at every pen stroke and cheers every crossed t. In a month or so, this diligent and optimistic creature gins out, say, two hundred pages. The editor self then shows up to heft the pages, give a sniff, and say: Yeah, but . . . The editor condenses two hundred pages down to about thirty. I don’t mean she cuts the rest; she may well boil the whole thing down so the same amount of stuff happens more economically.”(Mary Karr), “Don’t look back. Yes, the draft needs fixing. But first it needs writing.”(Don Murray). The early draft is just your test but the final revised copy is where you take your draft and comb through it making it shorter and easier to read “The pieces of writing I have not yet thought of writing will become different from what I expect them to be when I propose them to myself. My constant is change.”(Don Murray), “Every writer I know who’s worth a damn spends way more time ‘losing’ than ‘winning’”(Mary Karr). Both Murray and Karr also believe that writers today do not express themselves in their writing but instead express who the public wants to see, “Of course the writer attends to an “other self” that reflects the voices and expectations of a wider public”(Don Murray), “Through reading and thinking, they’ve raised their taste beyond their skill levels. So when they stare down at their pages, they can no longer superimpose what’s in their heads onto the work.”(Mary Karr). I am writing a letter to my author-self. Upon reading A Fable for the Living, I realized that if we stop connecting with people and things that are gone they die a second time. Their first death is the actual loss of them from the earth, but a person's second death is them being forgotten about forever. If we don’t keep in contact with things that we care about we begin to lose them, so I am writing to my author-self in hopes that it is not too late and that I can still keep in contact with him and create a strong bond between the two of us. Dear Kyle,
I feel that the two of us are very similar, we are creative in our own ways, and we love to express ourselves. Despite these similarities we seem to be trapped, separated like the star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet, ever destined to be so close to each other yet so far. Maybe they will see us as too powerful if we were to work well together. Despite these limitations I still get by. I do give you control of what I say sometimes. When I want to express strong emotions or opinions that's all you, I am bad at expressing myself in words. It is almost ironic, as if I have given you control over what to write in a letter to you. I would like to apologize to you for all of the bad interactions we have had in the past. It was mostly my fault for being too stuck up to admit that I needed your help. In recent years I have realized that I cannot do this without you and I am very lucky to have you, So thank you for being the little voice in my head that my friends say make my texts sound too formal. During the course of this semester i plan to try and communicate with my writer-self by keeping a notebook by my bed so that if I come up with something I want to write about or even vent about I can keep a record of it so that I don’t forget about what I wanted to write about. I also plan to talk with my writer-self more, not in the crazy person way, but in the way that it allows me to improve my everyday speech and break free of a lot of the slang that I use in everyday conversations. Sincerely, Conor |
conor mcgrathWelcome! I am pretty laid back and chill. glad you all could join me here on my journey. if you have any suggestions let me know. Archives
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