Christi Wood

My Truths about Fiction Writing

One point that I thought was very important from the readings is that a great place to get material for your writing is from personal experience. Many of the stories were based off of the author’s own life with little twists to help the story along. In my own story, I thought it was impressive that one of the main things about my story that my peers commented on was the shooting star under her eyes. This was one of the only things that I put into my story about my life because my son has this mark. I think it is important to notice that readers do connect to these real life aspects of the story even though they do not know where they come from. I believe this is because deep inside everyone knows where to separate real details from fiction.

With my fiction piece, I wanted to write something different and suspenseful. I realized after writing the piece that it is really hard to do this sort of writing because as the writer I know what I want to say, but sometimes the reader does not understand what is going on. It is important to make sure that the meaning in the writer’s head is conveyed into the story so that the reader knows what is trying to be said.

            One of the hardest parts for my fiction writing was deciding if it should be in first or third person. After reading this section in the text I decided to go with the first person perspective because I thought that it would give the reader a stronger personal experience with the character. I learned while writing that this is very hard to do and I still was not completely happy with the final product.

            I also learned during my writing and through the workshop process that it was definitely a work in process and I would like to keep going. I tried to take fifteen years and put it into ten pages and I realized this is an impossible task. One aspect to writing fiction is to make sure your subject is not too broad to put into the required length of writing. If you try to put too much information or too long of a time period into a shorter piece there are many things lost to the reader and there can be a lot of confusion, which is what happened with my writing. When choosing your topic you must choose something that can be understood fully or you will lose your audience.

            As a teacher I hope that I can be as objective as my peers were with my writing on my students writing. High school students have the fear of writing something and it not being good enough. Many times they will write about their own experiences and then their teachers will shoot them down. This happened to me when I was in school and I never understood how a teacher could criticize you for writing about what you know. I believe this class gave me a great understanding of how my students will feel with their work being read because my work had to be criticized by my peers. I was put into that fearful spot that they see every time they turn in their own work. And now that I have learned where writing should come from, I will not judge my students on what they write about, as my teachers did, because the best place to get material is from experience.

            I am currently trying to decide how to write a memoir about my life. My adult life has been a whirlwind of events, and I feel if I can get them on paper then I might be able to make some sense out of why things happened the way they did. Until this class, I really had no idea how to start, but after reading the text and listening to others stories, I now have a better idea. I plan to write the story how it happened and then rewrite with transformations changing some things to make it more interesting. As we discussed during workshop, people like to read about other people’s stories, so this gave me the motivation to begin mine. I hope to use some of the things people said about other’s stories and the advice about writing from the text to create my memoir.