Faron Samford

12-9-09

Facts About Fiction

            I have always preferred prose over poetry, but had never attempted writing any of my own without a prompt before this class. I had taken many literature classes, but had no experience with a creative writing class. I would always get ideas for a story, but never actually do anything to develop them. With what I have learned through the combination of workshops and the readings from Three Genres, I feel much more confident about my ability to develop my ideas into a quality piece of fiction.

            Sitting down at a blank page to write is a very intimidating thing to do. Staring at it and trying to come up with ideas on what to fill five to ten pages with seemed like an impossible task. The readings really helped with this in chapter thirteen, where it said that a really good way to develop your skills is to start with something from personal experience. I had always felt that my personal life would not make for interesting fiction. The chapter explained ways of taking certain elements from several personal stories and recombining them into something, with new details, that does make for an interesting story. I got a much better understanding of the different ways with which this can be done by the different approaches of Paul and Amanda. Amanda took her personal struggles and projected them through her main character; while Paul took his personal experience from working at Target and created a humorous tale of electronics in revolt.

             The combination of the reading assignments and workshops was not what I had originally expected when I signed up for this class, but as a teaching method, I found it highly effective to discuss a topic and then see its usage in a story during the workshop process. The combination of these two elements reinforces the topics in a less intimidating way because the manuscripts that we are discussing were written by our peers. As mentioned in chapter fifteen of the text, we rarely get to see a manuscript in any other version than the final, published version, which has undergone countless revisions.

            Writing dialogue is difficult, yet the discussion about eavesdropping on conversations to get conversational vernacular and phrasing helps with writing dialogue that sounds more realistic.  Before writing my fiction manuscript, I sat at a friend’s house and didn’t say anything for quite awhile and just listened to the manner in which they speak with each other. Learning this method enabled me to write a more realistic dialogue that made the characters seem more genuine.

            Using the strategies that we utilized in our class, I feel that I have learned to become a more confident writer and am willing to undertake a greater depth of story. Learning more structural elements of fiction and stylist choices to help with the creation of fresh ideas has taught me some ways to avoid typical mistakes that can make a story fall flat.