Extra Credit

    When taking creative writing I didn't think it would be as hard as it was. it wasn't hard as far as grading, it was just hard to keep up with the readings, assignments, and blogs. Even though I forgot the blogs at time, I made sure that I always kept up with the reading assignments because after the first few reads I started to become interested in the different stories, each time they were something different. The readings impacted the way I looked at creative writing and even impacted some of my writing.
     The first story that has stuck in my head after reading all of the stories was the mint snowball. Even though it was a short story, it had a lot of meaning to me. It was the story about a young person's great grandfather having a local convenient store in the older days and he made an mint snowball that everyone loved  so much, people even came from out of town to try it out. The young person's especially loved the mint snowball, that's who told them about it. In the story, the young person was just saying that they don't believe they are fit to live in this generation, they wanted to just be able to experience the old days and more importantly be able to taste the mint snowball.
    I think this story stuck with me so much because family is something that is very important to me and you wouldn't believe that the littlest things can keep a family together, in this story it was the mint snowball, in my story it was the annual Christmas eve party. I based one of my creative essays on this story. I titled it The Night Before Christmas. While writing this story I had the mint snowball right next to me. The language between the two is very similar, with the imagery. Even though they are both shorter stories, they both have great imagery. While reading them you can close your eyes and picture everything that is being said. I made sure that I copied the imagery to the tee, because since it was a short story, I still wanted to make sure that I got my point across to the reader.
    Another reading that influenced me with all of my writing was when the author was saying how she got invited to write a story on the special Olympics, and she once she got invited she said she knew what she was going to write about at that exact moment. Then when she got there she met a man who showed her a picture and said that he was cool, and when she went to get a snack she saw him playing basketball and he was the star player and she wrote about him in her story instead. This stuck with me because you never know what your plot is going to be, you just meet/ make the character and take everything from there. You are suppose to allow your character to make your plot. I have made sure I did this in all of my stories too, I am used to doing the opposite but I never really wrote creative writing papers/ stories. I am very proud of what I have accomplished in this creative writing class.  And I would like to thank the authors to both of these pieces of writing for helping me through the semester.