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.

Maps To Anywhere

In todays blog I am going to write about the House of the Future. We discussed this story last class and it stuck with me. It made me want to write about it in my blog because it gives off two different perspectives. In the story he begins talking about how his family had imagined having such a great home, in my eyes they compared it to Disney World. Then he started talking about how he had a sick brother and this is where I got confused. In some parts of the story he would talk like he would do anything for his sick brother and then in other instances he wouldn't even want to get close to him. For example when his brother asked him what he would do if it was a fire in the house and he replied by saying that he knew he would grab his brother out of the bed and grab his meds and get out as quick as possible. But then when his brother got really sick with dry scales on his skin and such, he didn't come out of his room to see his brother, he didn't even want to be close to him and not far after he died. I feel like of course he loves him because that is his brother, and everyone loves their siblings. But when you have a sibling who is sick, it puts more responsibility on everyone and there is where it gets hard, so maybe he just wasn't ready for that.

Mint Snowball

I read the essay packet, and my favorite story in it was the Mint Snowball by Naomi Shihab. I choose to wrote about this story because it has some sentimental value to it that I like. She is writing about how her great grandfather had a popular snack called the mint snowball and how people came from everywhere just to taste it. And how her mother used to love eating the snack while spinning on the chair in front of the bar. But before her great grandfather died he decided to sell the recipe to someone for $100 instead of passing it down, which made everyone sad. Especially her because she can only dream about being able to taste her great grandfathers recipe for the mint snowball. I think this story stuck to me so much because my grandmother had a recipe for Mac and Cheese, and even thought I don't like Mac and Cheese the rest of my family loves it and before she passed away she taught the recipe to my mother. So on holidays, my mom is always the one who has to make the Mac and Cheese, and I also feel like it keeps my grandmother with us. I can only imagine how it would have been if my grandmother wouldn't have gave my mom the recipe, nobody in my family would probably eat Mac and Cheese again. Sometimes it is the little things that keep faith in the family, rather its the recipe for the mint snow ball or mac and cheese.

The Girl With The Blackened Eye

I have been enjoying reading all of the fiction stories in class and discussing them with classmates in small groups. Although I have been keeping on all of the readings for fiction stories, I still always find myself coming back to read The Girl With The Blackened Eye when I need ideas about where to go in my stories when writing. I believe the reason being is because of the fact that the character was so unpredictable my first time reading it and I believe that's how a fiction story should be. The reader shouldn't be able to predict what your character will do or say next. The reason why I say she is so unpredictable is because of many different passages in the reading. For example, with a predictable character in her place she would have tried to escape or something of that sort. Where as with this character, she described the torture that the man was doing to her as love. Stuff like this is what keeps the reader intrigued in the story, if they were able to predict everything she would have did or said they would have not wanted to continue reading the story because they figured they knew the ending just by reading they beginning.


I don't want to have that kind of story... I want to keep my reader reading. Which is why I always go back and read The Girl With The Blackened Eye when I am trying to figure out my characters next move. I always remember the reading that said make your character not your plot. The character will make the plot for you, and its hard to stick to that when writing because you want to make sure that your story has a great plot. I feel as though you have to keep it even, you have to consider the character and the kind of plot you are going for. I feel as though The Girl With The Blackened Eye was going towards more of an intense plot, like a LifeTime movie. So far I believe my story is going in the direction I would like for it to go in, thanks to all of the different fiction stories I have been reading.

Fiction Stories

I am excited to start reading and writing fiction stories. I wasn't as good with poetry as I liked to be, but I think I will be better with fiction. In class before break, we discussed characters and how you shouldn't make the plot before making the character and how you never know who your character will be. The lady said that she was invited to write about the special Olympics, and she went with the mind set that she will just be writing a general story about everything, but when she went she met a gentlemen who changed that. He showed her a picture and pointed to himself and said, "that's a cool dude." When she went to get refreshments she peeked in a basketball game and seen the same man was the star of the game. So she decided to write about that instead of just the general Olympics. Her experience has me excited to write fiction, just because I feel like I can be anywhere doing anything and I could meet a character at any minute. With fiction I can also express myself because I can make myself the character and make myself do anything or feel any kind of way of want.

Writing Down the Bones

I have been having a lot of trouble understanding the readings in this class, because like I said in my last blog post. Poetry wouldn't be considered a strength of mines. But I am enjoying reading Writing Down the Bones. I'm sure it is because of the fact that it's not any poems, only stories. But no normal stories, stories that have a meaning that you have to figure out. In class on Tuesday we had to pick our two favorite stories and tell the class why we picked those two out of all the others.

Baking a Cake is the story on page 50.. where the author simply says that you can have all of the ingredients that's in a cake and put them into a bowl, but you still don't have a cake. You have batter, you still have to add heat from the stove to make it plump out and look like cake, you have to add icing, and etc. I think this is very important when comparing to writing, because you can have characters, a setting, a plot, etc. but it doesn't make it a piece of writing until you put them all together and add more verbs, adjectives, and nouns. You always have to put heat (energy) into something for it to be complete, even little things that you think you don't like writing.

Listening was the other one that I chose and in this one the writer talks about how she sang one day and her cousin said that she was tone-deaf, and because of that she had never sang again, just hummed. Until one day she went to a vocal lesson and the teacher told her that there was no such thing as tone-deaf and how music was just about listening to the harmony of the song. I chose this because I think a lot of people go through this in life. Somebody tells them that they can't do something and they listen and never try again... I've seen and heard many dreams being crushed because of listening to someone else.

Tocqueville

The book Tocqueville is a very hard read. I say this because I am not use to reading poems. So as I am reading the many different poems, I try analyzing them at the same time and I don't think everything in this book is meant for me to understand. A poem that I really like is titled Lyric, it's the first poem in the book. I like this poem because it makes you think, but not too hard. Like once I read it a few times I could sort of figure out what the poet was talking about.

Because the poem is called Lyric, I of course thought that it would be about music or the love of music. But lines like "to remember when we looked at one another and found a world again" made me realize that it was a love poem. I also noticed that this poem had a nice flow to it, which may be a reason that they named it lyric. I felt like the poet used good language in this poem, he/ she didn't use to much of the basic language but also didn't use language which made it hard to understand.

One thing that I think could have made this poem better was imagery. I am no poet, but I feel like with love poems imagery is also a plus. Being able to imagine them looking into each other eyes or having love at first sight would have made the poem better. In my eyes, there was not one stanza that included any imagery. Other than that, it is a great poem.