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.