This week was CRAZY!
I mean it! CRAZY! I had a reunion with fellow Disney College Program cast members, and we did some CRAZY STUFF!!!
.....
Okay, we had a bonfire, hung out, watched a scary movie, and a whole bunch of stuff like that. But when you've been doing schoolwork all week, anything else feels foreign. AND CRAZY!
Anyway.
My ENG320R class is fun too! Before I enrolled, I'd pretty much figured out my voice. I'm not PERFECT by any stretch of the imagination, but I know what I like and what I don't.
Soooo... I started out with the mindset that I'd experiment in my class. Do things that pushed my comfort zone, like trying new writing styles and genres. For instance, we had to write a MG short story, so I wrote about sports. I've never written anything about sports before, but I figure the best place to experiment with genres is in the classroom!
But then I realized... there's a reason I've never written sports, or whatever else I was planning to do. I don't like writing it!
Sorry, swimmer story. I really didn't have too much fun developing you.
See? The class taught me something valuable; no more swimmers.
But now, I'm at war with myself. To experiment or develop my current style farther? THAT is the question.
Option two sounds best.
If anyone READS this, comments?
Hi Jameson, this is Becca. I'm in 320 with you.
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking a lot about going outside my comfort zone as a writer. It's something we've been talking about quite a bit in one of my graduate creative writing classes. My instructor has been giving us interesting prompts that limit our freedom in writing (one time he made us choose a vowel and omit it from our writing. Talk about tedious! It was so hard to come up with e-less words!)
But I've been thinking about that exercise a lot. It made me realize how much I rely on being comfortable as a writer, about how I sit back easily on my old crutches and just let myself pound out sentence after comfortable sentence. It doesn't get you anywhere. In that way, I think experimentation is like running with weights. It forces us to grow and strengthens our writing muscles. Then when we don't have those limits in place, and we get back to writing what we like, we've discovered that it's much easier. And maybe we feel more comfortable experimenting with language when we're done, because we realized that, even though maybe the experiment failed, we can still step outside what we're comfortable with. And that's valuable, too, I think.
That's all. See you in class!
I'm with Becca. I liked that swimmer. That's not to say you shouldn't write what you love or continue with your strengths, but I think it's a good idea to play around. To push yourself. We can talk more about it in class. Thanks for this post.
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