Gotta Get GOT

3rd Quarter Reflection

This quarter has given me a lot of time to work on my main piece. This opportunity has been very useful, since I haven’t been able to devote this much time to my novella since the summer. I’ve made a good deal of progress with it, as far as cleaning it up and further developing characters who otherwise would have remained half-finished. When we went to work with Dr. Totland, I was able to stretch and take a bit of a break from my main work and explore playwriting a bit more. As a writer, I discovered that I’m quite uncomfortable with stage-writing, but since I discovered that now instead of ten years from now, I think that’s quite helpful to know. Otherwise, I feel like I am getting on more solid ground with my novella.

The Danger of Gravity

The weight of the brick is insignificant. All you really need to know is that it’s hard, and that it’ll hurt when you drop it on your foot. You don’t need to have dropped it on your foot in order to know that the brick will cause damage. You just need to look at it. 
Kyle was looking at the brick from a distance, as if it would spring up and bite him if he got too close. He considered taking a stick and poking the brick, as if that would cause some violent reaction from the hunk of concrete. After a minute of contemplation, he ran his finger over the porous surface, liking the feeling of his skin scraping against the cold and unforgiving brick. He then picked it up with both hands, moving his arms up and down just to feel the undeniable pull of gravity on his slim wrists. 
He put the brick down again, right where he had found it, in a pile in his backyard. Kyle’s father had been telling his mother that he would build a firepit when he brought the bricks home after work three weeks ago. His mother had just shrugged and left her husband alone. It was another one of his projects, after all. Very few of his projects were useful. He’d built a bookshelf that was lopsided and fell apart within a week. He’d tried to build a treehouse for Kyle once, and ended up making a lean-to against the tree in the backyard. He’d once built a stool, and that actually worked very well, until Kyle’s mother accidentally set it on fire. 
Kyle sat on the ground then, and began to re-arrange the pile of bricks, carefully stacking them very methodically. The sun beat his back and face, and the wind made his allergies act up, and his fingers were battered by the porous concrete, and bees fluttered around his head threateningly, and his clothes were getting dusty, but none of that mattered to Kyle. He liked the protective warmth of the sun, and the friendly tug of the wind in his hair, and the solid brick in his hands, and the gentle buzzing of the bees, and he could always just wash his clothes again. 
He didn’t know how long he had been stacking and unstacking the bricks. Every time he ran out of them, he would tear down his construction just as eagerly as he had built it. The sun stopped beating down so heavily, and the wind got a little sharper, and his hands hurt from the weight of the bricks, and the bees had gone away, and he began to feel grimy. The appeal of building was lost slowly, he noticed. That morning, all he had wanted was to just hold one of the bricks in his hands. Around noon he had begun building. Now, with the sun setting and his arms growing heavy, he was bored and tired. But if he went back into the house, his mother would have asked him to help her with chores. So he took one of the bricks in his hand and began wandering around the yard in wide, slow, loops as he felt the cool grass and still-warm dirt in between his toes.
His eyes caught movement, and he fixated on the shape. A neighborhood cat had come into the yard. It was white, except for his brown paws and his black-tipped tail. The short-haired cat sat on the pile of bricks, and began to clean himself. Kyle inched towards the animal, hoping he would not scare it away. The cat ignored him and kept on grooming himself. Kyle called to the cat, but he did not lift his head. He called louder, but still the cat did not look up. He jumped up and yelled again, waving his arms, but the cat just ignored him. Kyle hated being ignored. He clenched the brick, and grit his teeth, seething. He called the cat names, and he even used the swear-words his parents used with each other. 
The cat would not look up until Kyle was less than three feet away. Kyle felt the anger surging and before he could stop himself, he held the brick, ready to bash the cat’s skull. He held his hand up, shaking, and he dropped the brick. Down it came. He felt it drag at his fingers as it fell away. He swore that he heard it whistle on the way down. The black tip of the cat’s tail was smashed, and in slow motion, the brick bounced off and onto Kyle’s foot. Reacting first, the cat yowled and sputtered hisses as he ran out of the yard. Kyle took longer to realize that the brick had indeed sunk into his foot. Then came the pain. Hot and stabbing and throbbing, he howled and began to cry, clutching his crushed foot uselessly. 
His mother ran out, panicked. She scooped up the boy and tried to calm him down. His left foot was turning purple, and Kyle screamed when she tried to touch it. Feeling helpless, she let him cry while she murmured quietly. He stopped, and only whimpered occasionally, pushing his head against her shoulder. 
She got up then, holding her son protectively, and took him inside where she applied an ice pack to his foot. When Kyle’s father came home, she ordered him to remove the bricks from the yard. He never attempted another project. 

The weight of the brick was no longer insignificant to Kyle. His foot was fractured, and he was in a cast for weeks. He knew the brick was hard, and he had even known that it would hurt him, just by looking at it. But none of that mattered to Kyle before he hurt himself. None of the warnings ever seem to matter, until you find out why for yourself.

Creative Writing Second Semester

For the second semester, I would like to be able to explore more forms of creative writing. I think SpokenWord could be an interesting medium worth trying. Also, I wouldn't mind being able to respond to photographs with our writing, because that process usually helps inspire better writing. As for the longer project, I think I will change that from my plans from my one novel to a collection of shorter pieces, since the long piece has shrunk.

Self-Reflection

This semester in Creative Writing class, I’ve been working on improving the depth of my work and the power of subtle details than can add to a character. In this semester, I’ve written half of a play, a memoir, two poems, half of a new draft on my longest work, and three short stories. I got to grapple a bit with play writing, a medium with which I am very unfamiliar, and really try to hammer out something presentable. My poems usually sprang from writer’s block as I attempted to force myself out of it, creating an often surprisingly bitter and deep snapshot. Once we moved away from playwriting and back to the more familiar and less-visual writing, I wrote a memoir and really got to explore my own voice, rather than that of my characters. But I think the work I’m most proud about is that I have started on a sixth draft of my long piece of writing, really getting the opportunity to sit and chisel away at it every morning.

As for my skills, I think by writing almost every day, they’ve improved substantially. My sentences are growing in complexity and I am able to wield them concisely and efficiently. This sort of combination of Creative Writing and my English class has definitely allowed me to emphasize and focus on what I can do as a writer, especially when the two collide and I can take what I learned in either class and apply it to the other to make my writing stronger overall. Also, my voice has become stronger, and my already conversational style has been able to switch between analyzing and creative writing, giving me much more versatility and relatability to my reader. As a person who dislikes setting concrete goals, I would love to finish my sixth draft and see where that takes me.

Catching a Rocket

I really hate just sitting on the couch. If I do it at all, it’s because my mother has ordered me to because I’m about to keel over with the flu, or I’m reading. I’ve been playing softball since I was twelve. But, I have severe nerve damage in my right shoulder ever since a girl collided with me when I was thirteen, so I’ve had to deal with chronic pain. The worst part about this nerve is that it lies right on a vein, so whenever I run around hard enough, it’ll throb against it until I can sit down and relax. This has been something I just had to deal with. About three weeks into the softball season during my freshman year at school, I found that my shoulder now ached continuously, and that simply sitting down for a few minutes did not abate it. My doctor told me that I could never play sports again.

Of course, I didn’t listen to her. I took three weeks off while I got acupuncture and rested. While I did that, I also made sure that I went to practice everyday after school, just to watch my team. Every time a ball was thrown, my whole body would tense up, and I would twitch my hands and whine to myself pathetically.

The day I came off of my injury, we had an away game. I had not played in any game since the season started. My coaches told me that I probably wouldn’t be playing in the game that day, but they wanted me on the bench, just in case. I boarded the bus grumpily, disappointed with myself for my crippled shoulder. But when we got to the field, our team was missing a few people, and we needed to fill positions. They put me right on second base. My coaches looked at me as if I were one of the sorriest sights they’d ever seen, and I agreed. I hadn’t been working out in weeks, I was rusty, and to put me so suddenly in a game like this seemed like a suicide mission.

The game started, and it seemed like the whole world got quiet. I shook where I stood, praying that our pitcher would strike this batter out. On the first pitch, the batter swung, and shot a rocket in the no-mans land between shortstop and second. Before I could register what happened, my glove hand shot out, and somehow, I had the ball. My whole team looked at me as if I were an MVP. No one could believe that I caught that ball. I was just as shocked as they were, not only for the catch, but also that my shoulder was okay. I didn’t feel that too-familiar debilitating stabbing that would go all the way down my arm. I thanked my acupuncturist and cursed my doctor under my breath.

But the game of softball does not allow for much celebration in between batters. The next girl stood up in the batters’ box, she was tall and her shoulders looked bigger than two of me stacked on top of each other. But I took a deep breath of the dusty air, popped my feet, and begged for the ball with my glove. Just as I began to bend my knees, I heard a loud thud, and time seemed to slow down. I had all the time in the world to get behind this large ball. It was spinning slowly towards me, but there was no way that I could catch it full-on, so I threw my left arm over to my right desperately. With a soft smacking sound, I had caught it. I dazedly retracted my arm to marvel at that neon yellow ball, not quite comprehending what I had done for several minutes. The crowd gasped and stared, then they began to clap. Even members of the other team were congratulating me.

After that second catch, my coaches called timeout. My coaches sized me up, both beaming. They moved me straight to third base, a position I had never played before, but they assured me that I would be fine. Ever since then, I’ve been their third baseman. We lost the game, ultimately. But walking back to our bus, everybody had a word to say about the small blonde kid who caught not one, but two, rockets.

Monologue

SARAH

I don’t have a choice anymore. They’ve got to just deal with this. I’m not responsible for their problems. I don’t need to handle this. I shouldn’t have to be doing this. I should be eating dinner, or doing homework. I’m leaving. I’m going to go, and there’s nothing that can be done to stop me. Not at this point. I’ve signed up. I’m leaving soon. I’m going into the Air Force. They can try to stop me, sure, but they can’t because I’ve signed up. I’d like to see them try to stop me, as if they cared.