Prompt: For Journal #3 Look back over your past humanities courses and assignments and identify three to four of the following: most memorable work(s) you encountered, questions you still think about, a sample of your work you’re most proud of or one you wish you could do over. Write a post that describes what you did then and what you notice about that work now. You’ll drawn from this initial “inventory” (to anticipate a term from Newstok) when you select a revision project.

Response:

  1. Most Memorable Work: I think my most memorable work was probably a short story I wrote in Jesse Miller’s advanced fiction writing course. It was my first time being in a course where people were as passionate and serious about writing as I was, so I wanted to really try and do my best on our first assignment. The short story I wrote was title, “Allan Nash”. It was set in the 1960s and focused on the protagonist, Allan, and his relationship with one of the old men he delivers newspapers to. At the time, I got a lot of nice comments and helpful critiques that helped me grow as a writer. Even though my final assignment in Professor Miller’s class was to revise this story, I feel like there are things I can change to improve it. One of the biggest things I wish I could change regards the characters. I feel like I tried to include too many people and too many subplots to make a meaningful work, yet I’m proud of the dialogue.
  2. Questions I Still Think About: Last spring, I took a course with Dr. Frank called “Victorian Monsters”. During this course, we would look at monster literature from the Victorian era and analyze their themes. A question that came up a lot during class discussions was, “What makes something a monster?”. To answer this question, the class did weekly QCQs on books/materials we read. The QCQs I created brought up a lot of questions for me based on different quotations and my comments to them. I won’t list all of the questions I had, but one that still sticks with me from this course was about how monster literature changed readers’ perceptions of sexual assault and if it had allowed individuals during the Victorian era to freely talk about those issues without it seeming “monstrous”. When looking back at the QCQ assignments, I noticed that I asked a lot of questions regarding Victorian society, so that could be something I could look into more.
  3. Work I’m Most Proud Of: The work that I’m most proud of is from an independent study I did with Jesse Miller. The goal of the independent study was to look at what goes into writing a novella, such as character design, outlining, finding agents, etc. While working on smaller reflections and exercises, Professor Miller had me write about 70 pages of a novella. The novella I wrote is called “Caim and Abel”. It follows a man, named Abel, as he tries to navigate his life while being haunted by a demon named Caim. I’m proud of this work because it really pushed me to write regularly and to have confidence in my own creative choices. One of the things I noticed when looking back at some of my earlier chapters was just how dialogue heavy it felt, but in the later chapters, the amount of dialogue decreases without losing its meaning.
    • Sample: “It would have been easier if Quinn had been disappointed or angry at me for not going in, but he wasn’t. He never seemed to be angry with me. He never seemed to be disappointed with me. Quinn was nothing but supportive and understanding, even if I didn’t deserve that from him sometimes. Nevertheless, he smiled at me and stretched his arms in the air, soaking in the heat from the sun. God, Quinn was beautiful. He wasn’t necessarily fit, but he was lean, and tall, and his hair practically turned into molten bronze at the hint of sunlight.”
  4. Work I Wish I Could Do Over: Honestly, I really wish I could redo most of my creative writing assignments based on feedback I received. If I wasn’t already working on the second manuscript of “Caim and Abel”, I would say that I would redo that project. I wrote a story in my short fiction writing class that could’ve been better. The story, called “Six Bullets”, was about an FBI-type agent who has her proposal interrupted by assassins. I rewrote it for my final and changed it to focus more on the characters rather than the action side of things, but it still has a long way to go. On the other hand, I took a grant writing course with Professor Miller a few semesters ago. While I got a good grade in the class, I felt like I could’ve done better on the semester-long project. We had to create a nonprofit and went through the grant seeking process step by step. I wish I could redo that project as I feel like my group tried to add too much into our nonprofit, so there was a lot of miscommunication when it came to the writing process.