Last week, when I said that I would continue to update my blog with chapters of The Six…yeah that was a lie. It was an unintended one, sure, but as I thought about the benefits of continuing to post chapters from my novel I realized that there weren’t many, if any at all (benefits that is, not chapters).
Like when I chose not to post my Senior Portfolio introduction, there were two major reasons behind my change of heart. First, when I said that The Six is currently ‘very very bad’ I hadn’t really looked at the piece in over two years. This, of course, means that I’ve spent two years working on, and improving my writing skills beyond what they were during my independent study. In these two years I’ve learned a lot about what it means to be a writer, and not just within the fiction discipline. My poetry has improved dramatically and so have my technical writing skills. So when I began formatting The Six for the blog, I thought that it might be a nice time to edit some, maybe fix a few problem areas and just in general make it a better piece…which meant I had to read it. Let’s just say that I wouldn’t be against inserting a few more ‘very’s before that word ‘bad’ in its ‘very very bad’ description (and no, I didn’t edit it any).
Now, it’s all well and good for me to say: ‘I’ve gotten better. No really…” After all, in those two years I wrote pretty much constantly. Even during the summer breaks, when Knox College is traditionally closed, I was at Oakton Community College and Northeastern Illinois University taking summer classes that required significant amounts of essay writing. In those two years I went from struggling with the basics of writing fiction, like deciding on what perspective I wanted to use, to more ‘advanced’ (for me at least) concepts like the use of language within a given work. However, I’m jumping ahead of myself and it’d be an over exaggeration of my progress if I moved too far ahead without explanation, a potential misconception that I would like to avoid if at all possible.
So, for this week, I come to the very next fiction work I wrote, entitled Claustrophobic Spelunker. As the title may suggest, this piece is about a cave diver who is, at the same time, afraid of enclosed places. Written during a Beginning Fiction Workshop the goal was to write a story in less than five pages. Easy right? Wrong! My first foray into writing had been a novel of over 200 hundred pages. Now I was expected to write a short story that was less than 3% the length of that work.
As you’ll see, I only sort of succeeded. At four pages (double spaced) I stayed within the limits of the assignment. However, Claustrophobic Spelunker isn’t what I would call a proper story. It has no plot as it’s simply a character sketch and many of the things I say within its four pages are nothing more than wrong (I am neither claustrophobic nor am I an avid spelunker). It is, however, miles better than The Six.
I attribute this advancement to the enforced length because it made me avoid dialog of any sort. This isn’t to say that dialog isn’t useful, but rather that I didn’t know how to utilize it properly. In this sense I was introduced to my first lesson: the proper uses of dialog or, more appropriately, the improper uses of dialog. Though I can’t say I fully understood what that meant at the time, at the very least I wasn’t starting every paragraph with a quotation which, in and of itself, is a gigantic step forward.
A bit of teaser for next week (introducing A Regression of Thought):
Many times a writer is asked ‘what do you write about?’ It’s a trick question that, in my experience, can’t be answered. Rather, the best answer to this question is ‘I write about what I write about’. This isn’t meant to be some sort of cheeky response (although it certainly can become one if needed). Instead it is a simple means of saying that the best way to understand what a writer writes about is to read their work. They’ve spent countless hours creating revision after revision of the same manuscript to make sure that what they say is exactly what they mean. In this sense, a two sentence explanation means next to nothing.
Although I stated that there were two reasons why I had decided to discontinue The Six I only covered one (the poor writing). I abstained from mentioning the second explanation due to the need to introduce you to the above question…
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