Owen's Writing Week 2

The ‘piece’ I had first considered posting for this week was my Senior Portfolio introduction. Written during the spring term of my senior year at Knox, it was designed to explore how and why I came to be a writer, what writing means to me, as well as some of my ambitions for the future. It was a tall expectation, but in the end I was able to accomplish it, even if just barely. It’s been less than a year since I turned in that assignment and, as I skim over the pages now, I find faulty logic, incorrect assumptions, and thoughts that I would like to have rephrased in favor of something more accurate. Regardless of its problems, however, it would have allowed for an easy way to introduce you to me and my work.

It quickly became clear, though, that the introduction was not appropriate for my blog for two reasons. First was the content of the piece. When I wrote it I did so with an expectation that only a handful of people would ever read it: my peers for editing and my professor. As such, I included other people’s personal information regarding subjects that are sometimes considered controversial. It would be inappropriate for me to put that information into the public domain without their consent, which I don’t have. The second reason applies more directly to you and this. Withholding the introduction gives me the chance to update these ‘old’ attitudes throughout the life of the blog.

So I come back to where I began. Which of my pieces should I begin with? Should it be one of my short stories, a poem, or a critical essay? Should it be something that I am working on now, a piece that I have permanently put aside, or one that I plan on picking up again in the future? Should the example I choose represent my best work or not? Eventually it came down to a combination of how I wanted to present myself (which is sort of the point) as well as how I wanted to structure the blog as a whole.

When I decided to start this endeavor I did a small inventory of the works that would appear here, as well as ones that could but were, for whatever reason, questionable additions. Of these works I ran across a novel I had begun writing when I was a junior in High School called The Six. This piece most definitely fits under the later group of ‘questionable’ works and does so because it is, quite simply, very very bad. It’s a high fantasy piece (no, that’s not why it’s bad) that I used as a de-stressor during a bad year. This was largely due to a case of Bronchitis that went undiagnosed for months. I wrote for myself, and while I thought that I might be able to publish the work with significant edits, the initial drafts were only intended for close friends and family members. I continued to work on the story throughout my first two years of college. If I was ever to publish the novel it would be well after I had established myself.

When I eventually began looking at Creative Writing as a possible major I worked out an independent study that focused specifically on this novel. The idea of the independent study was to introduce me to some of the basics of writing creatively, a look at what ‘literature’ actually meant, and to help me determine if I could handle a Creative Writing major. I can’t say it was 100% successful, but it got me going in the right direction.

Below is the first chapter of that novel. Each update will include a new chapter along with another piece of my work. Some weeks I will talk about The Six as a whole or the posted chapter specifically. Other weeks I’ll limit my comments to my other writing. This way I can get my ‘start’ out there, but you aren’t stuck with 30 chapters (and therefore 30 weeks) of really bad writing.