Journal Three: Shitty First Drafts

I like to believe great writers just sit down and let all their ideas come to them, perfect from their brain to the page, down to the last period. This fantasy makes me feel better about some of the first drafts I have turned in, somehow making them more acceptable as essays. I know this is clearly not the case, professional writers spend ridiculous amount of time on their pieces, reading, editing, rewriting, and repeating. I personally feel like I have never gotten that system down, or found the right editing system for myself. I mean I have edited in classes and on my own, correcting big grammatical and spelling mistakes, as well as taking out sentences and rearranging words to provide more clarity or make a point more impactful. I haven’t ever printed out my work and cut it up then rearranged it, or taken colored pencil to it and moved words and phrases around. Most of the time I just sit down, with my handwritten outline, and write my essay. I suppose you could say I edit as I go (I went back and corrected some things just now) but I really feel like I can’t get as into the editing process as others do. I can’t decide if its because I don’t want to spend the time on the pieces I wrote in high school, or if it was more that I was scared to really look at my writing. Thinking about it now, it was definitely that I didn’t want to spend all the time I think real editing is on essays that I didn’t really care about. I definitely have a writing process, which I trust warily; the outline, then the introduction (my favorite part, I could write intro’s all day), then some fiddling around, a few more sentences, going for a walk, getting inspired for write another paragraph, checking Facebook, and then getting disgusted with how little I have done and cranking out the rest, ending with a conclusion I hate, no matter what it is. Reading this article, and talking to a friend that is a creative writing major, has helped me realize how much of an art writing really is. “Sometimes I just can’t write,” she said, and this friend of mine writes like its her job already, anything and everywhere, and I think it’s the same when I just can’t think of an idea for an architecture project, I can’t build or draw, or even think. But for every architecture project, I end up with a stack of about one hundred crap designs, junky cardboard models, and a million different ideas which I continually revise and change until one is perfect for the project specifications. I think I am willing to spend the time on it because I love the project, and the more I work on it the better it gets, and the better I feel. I am hoping that with more freedom in choosing my topics in college, I’ll like my writing more, and be willing to revise it more, completely tear it apart and built it back up, making it stronger than ever.

Journal Two: Response to “Tour of Duty” by Denise Grollmus

I first just want to say wow to this personal narrative; it brings to light a whole other side that most people don’t know about their teachers, that they have had real, interesting, and even news-worthy lives. I hope I can do justice in writing about it.

The subject of this piece is Denise’s experience on music tour with her boyfriend. I think that this particular piece is really relevant, especially to college kids, like those she teaches, because most college kids want to live the illusion of grandeur the rock life gives: the drinking, the crazy nights, popular drunk use, women throwing themselves all over, loud music, breaking things, lack of hygiene, and just in general going crazy and not having consequences. Yes, higher education is the goal in college, but it isn’t what defines college. Beyond just being an account of her experiences on tour, it goes into her feelings and reactions to things that happened, were said, etc. during that time and pulls the reader into the experience, feeling her feelings, understanding her thoughts, and reacting themselves. I doubt the intended audience was a college English class, and judging from the article, it was meant for readers of this magazine, Scene, people who were probably interested in music, and Denise’s point was to show the dirty underbelly of the rock and roll tour world that is glamorized often in media. Touring is real work, and exhausting as Denise describes. She was sharing her story, almost as a warning, a kind of exposé on the tour life, and I can imagine that, for an English professor, writing this story down was a sort of cleansing and relieving experience, a way of dealing with everything that had happened, and organizing her memories.

My favorite rhetorical device used was the dialogue. It just added another layer of flavor to the writing and a “wow” factor over the things that some people really do say to each other. To me, the dialogue just made the writing so real, I can’t even explain why the little snippets were so powerful to me. It was definitely a pathos pull because of the emotion and reality that dialogue and quotes represent. Emotions can be glossed over or embellished in writing, but true quotation should just be simply the spoken words. I really want to incorporate more dialogue effectively into the memoir piece I’m about to write, which would involve remembered more conversations effectively, and also knowing which ones, and which snippets of which ones, are the most powerful and effective for my purpose.

Journal One

Writing has always been a necessary evil and yet ultimate expression of creativity for me. I hate it and love it at the same time. I have written a forty-page paper in a week and in the same time barely managed one page. It has always been a temperamental art to me, and dependant on the topic, so to me, my strengths and weaknesses fluctuate.

Concise-ness, if that is a word, has always been a strength of mine I believe. I have never believe in writing useless, meaningless sentences just to take up space and meet a length requirement. The great thing about writing is that it is there, permanent, for a reader to go back over, so I believe in making a point and moving on. Readers can chose how much repetition they need. A good vocabulary should accompany concise writing, but I would say that it is one of my weaknesses. I am always looking to expand my vocabulary, and this semester I really want to accomplish that in this class. Vocabulary is also dependant on the topic, content, style, tone, and intended audience of the writing. I learned from J. Cole, a rapper, http://www.jcolemusic.com/ that good vocabulary doesn’t always mean a good message and vice versa. If you ignore the not so classy language, his message is really powerful and he has inspired me to think about the content and meaning of the words I write more.

Another strength and weakness combination that I believe I posses as a writer is that I write almost exactly as if I were talking. That can be good in a casual sort of essay, but most of the time, it doesn’t come off the right way when read and can in my own criticism of myself, make me sound less educated and credible than I really am. The strength of this quality though is that I am very straightforward and honest with my writing, I don’t try to hide anything with flowery descriptions or wishy-washy phrasing, I just say what I have to say and mean it.

I would really like to improve my writing ability a lot with this course, and even after one class it really seems like I will have the potential to. I really hope to become a more credible, professional sounding writer, which will no doubt help me further in life as I begin job interviews and resume writing. I also want to improve the organization of my writing, and really look into editing, not merely just go over the grammar and spelling components. To aid in those goals I have, I really want to expand my vocabulary, plan my pieces, do research in my topics, and in general just immerse myself more into my writing. A huge goal that I have for myself this semester is to make my writing more exciting, to really grab the reader’s attention, which my favorite book, The Marathon Man by William Goldman (http://www.amazon.com/Marathon-Man-William-Goldman/dp/0345439724/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1294793852&sr=8-2)does.

It is such an exciting page-turner, and even though it is pure fiction, it has some history behind it, and I wish all my writing would be like that. With help and criticism from the class I am hoping it will be.