- Snowday: This piece was inspired by watching the snowfall when we were out of school for a snowday. As I watched the flakes fall to the ground, my mind wandered back to a memory from several years ago of my very first snowday. At this time, I was learning about ways to use description and dialogue to make the story interesting. I used several of these elements in this piece, describing the snow and creating a voice for each of my characters.
- Sunset: This piece was inspired by sitting on my back porch one night and watching the sun as it faded into the horizon. I wanted to capture the beauty and magnificence of it all while still maintaining a certain simplicity in the language to make it easier for all ages to relate to. When I wrote this, I was learning the importance of creating a tone and sticking to it throughout the piece; in this poem, I tried to maintain a sense of wonder and reflectiveness as I described the sunset.
- Color Dance: This poem has somewhat of a strange inspiration. The assignment was to write a poem about how we thought colors would act if they were human, but when I tried to sit down and write it, my mind went completely blank. That night, I was babysitting my younger cousins, who were coloring at the kitchen table as I worked on homework. The radio was on, and one of them got up out of nowhere and just started to dance and twirl around with the music. (It just so happened that the song was "YMCA" and she was wearing a yellow shirt, which I used in one of the lines in the poem.) This made me wonder: what kind of music would each color listen to? What kind of dance would each color do? I started to write, and "Color Dance" was finished in ten minutes! At the time, I was learning how to create personality in a character through description and dialogue, so I tried not to actually say how each color felt; rather, I tried to create those feelings by saying how each color danced.
- The Water Is Wide: I wrote this poem after hearing a song by Garth Brooks titled "The River". In the song, he sings about life being like a river, "ever changing as it flows," and each person being a vessel in that river, "that must follow where it goes." The title was borrowed from a movie about a Low Country teacher in the 1970s who inspired a whole culture to better itself, starting with its children. At the time I wrote this, I was learning about using metaphors and similes in writing. As I wrote this poem, I found myself thinking back to all the people in my life--family, friends, teachers--that have inspired me, and I used the metaphor of a ship in the distance to represent these people. The water in this poem is representative of life and how it never stays the same, but keeps changing with the times.
- Chess Match: This piece is actually two poems, but the central idea of a simple game of chess is carried from one into the other. I wanted to try a two-part poem, and I was somewhat surprised by the results because the two poems did not use the same formats or styles, but I feel that what tied them together best was that I wrote one from the perspective of the players and one from the perspective of the pieces. At the time I wrote this piece, I was learning several techniques: first of all, how to describe a character using actions and dialogue; secondly, how to use different forms of poetry. The original "Chess Match" was written using the first technique to describe my chess partner. "Chess Match, Part Deux" utilized the classic pantoum format, reinforcing certain important ideas through repetition and rhythm.
Part Two--Process of Revision
The poems in this selection did not undergo any major revisions, although I did tweak a few rhymes or added or took away words to fit the rhythm of the piece. The most revision came with writing "Snowday."
In "Snowday," I had to revise several times--first to remove passive voice and some excess repetition, then several more times to add in descriptions and reinforce characters' voices. I had to try to come up with multiples ways of saying "snow," as that word appeared too many times in my first draft. I also revised to use the BrushStrokes techniques we were learning at the time, varying my sentence structures to make the piece more interesting and entertaining to read. Perhaps the biggest problem I had in writing "Snowday" was trying to create a specific voice for each character, be it the "caring-but-overbearing" mother, the "more-adult-than-child" brother, or the "overly cautious" toddler with the wild imagination. I also tried to maintain a slightly subliminal sarcasm throughout the piece, going back through my story several times to add this in.
Part Three--Learning From Your Classmates- Power of Vivid Descriptions
In reading John's piece about witnessing the brutal murder of a police officer while in Italy, I felt as if I had been standing right beside the narrator as the whole scene unfolded. His descriptions made the scene come alive, and all the sounds and smells in the story seemed so real. I tried to capture this in my writing as well, especially in "Snowday" because I wanted the reader to be able to put him or herself in the place of my character and experience the story with that character. I think John did a very good job of mastering this technique, and he will be one of the many writers I will look to as I try to work on this in my writing.
http://johnscreativewritingblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/just-another-rainy-day.html
- Creating a Strong Mood in Poetry
In reading several of Katie's and Emily's poems, I learned that it is important to be able to create a strong mood within the reader as he or she reads your work. Since poetry is usually much shorter than prose, it takes a lot of talent and effort to be able to evoke such strong feelings in one's readers. However, I think both of these writers have mastered this technique, through diction as well as description. In their poems, if the main character feels hatred or passion toward another subject, the reader can clearly distinguish the emotion and feels just as much of that emotion toward the antagonist in the piece as the main character does. This really adds to the reader's experience--to be able to walk away from reading and say, "Wow, I actually felt that."
http://emidilweegomefofers.blogspot.com/2007/02/letter-to-you.html
http://ktsuntitledblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/devils-hand.html
- Power of Brevity
In reading Dean's piece entitled "Wisdom," I learned that brevity in a piece of writing can be a very effective thing. Dean used vivid descriptions to fully personify the character of Wisdom in only three lines, and the reader can fully visualize the character, despite the very brief nature of the piece. I think it is essential to be able to leave certain aspects of a character to one's own imagination; I believe that makes the reader think. However, in this description of the character, there is much left unsaid that the reader can speculate upon without losing the character's identity. The brevity of the piece also evokes the strong sense of honor and nostalgia in the reader, being able to picture him or herself in that very room at that very time with Wisdom.
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