This week was spent almost completely working on our “Elements of Fiction” project, which consists of two essay written in a group. Our two elements of fiction were Characterization and Point of view. We split up the work between the four people in our group. Josephine and Alexis wrote the characterization essay around the character Sonny from “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin. Austin and I were tasked with writing an essay comparing and contrasting the use of point of view and how it effected the story in “The Boarding House” by James Joyce and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates. I enjoyed this assignment for two reasons. First, I enjoy both of the stories we used for this project. I have read multiple works by both James Joyce and Joyce Carol Oates before this project and reading more of their work as well as looking at it past it’s entertainment value was a useful experience. Second, I had never really thought about what point of view brings to a story before this project. Both of the stories that we looked at were both in a form of third person point of view. However, When looking at the difference between limited and omniscient it changes how one can look at the story. In “Where are you going, the point of view is third person limited, which creates a much more isolated mood and ups the creep factor in Oates's writing. In “The Boarding House” The Omniscient point of view creates a much more open story full of different information creating a larger less isolated picture.
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This week I feel that most of the focus in class was based on some form of writing. To begin the week we met with and listened to author James Jackson. One of the biggest takeaways from Jackson’s visit for me was that not everyone is going to enjoy your writing, and that maybe only ten percent of people may actually enjoy the genre that you might be writing in. Personally I didn’t enjoy what I read of the book he shared with us, but someone might, and he writes for that ten percent. Another thing he mentioned that stood out to me was creating a time and space to write. Personally I do not write stories or have any particular topic I like to work on at any time, but I think writing is important to organize thoughts. By setting up a set time to write and having a physical space to do it in the likelihood that I will actually write an even improve on it is more likely. Taking this into consideration I also worked on my creative writing piece this week to be shared with Ben and Mr.Schoenborn. I choose the one that I had started the first week of school because it reminded me of when I was still in a pleasant mindspace. While writing this week I worked on revisions such as further developing ideas and reorganizing the structure of the piece.
This week we spent time starting two new projects, both involving writing. First off we started our creative writing project. Since the beginning of the year various prompts have been thrown out and have been given class time twice a week to write whatever we wanted about these prompts. Starting tuesday I began the revision process of my very first creative writing piece from this class. I choose to write about my summer because it was what was most fresh in my mind. I love working on and writing this piece because it brings me back to a place I was content. I began my editing by splitting up my paragraph of flow of consciousness word vomit into different emotions, and developing them further from there. This week we also started our “what is literature” project. For this project the class split themselves into groups and choose stories to use in a series of essays to describe an element of fiction. Our group choose the elements Characterization and Point of View, in all honesty because all of the others were already taken. To describe Characterization our group chose to read “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin using the character of Sonny. For Point of View our group choose the stories “The Boarding House” , by James Joyce, and “Where are you going, where have you been”, By Joyce Carol Oates, who I am very interest in right now. All of the projects we are doing around writing right now are really getting me to look at how I write and how I can improve my process, which makes me look forward to the rest of the year. |
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November 2017
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