brainstorming for Craft Essay

Here is some of my  brainstorming for the Craft Essay. I still need to add specific examples and hit a couple other points.

I have gotten many opportunities to write a variety of things since I started college. At first, it was a lot of research papers, which was just about taking information, processing it, and putting it back out. More recently, however, I have been given the opportunity to write creatively, which I really appreciate. I've been able to write poetry, fiction stories, reflective essays, and creative nonfiction. I like many subjects, but as I expand I've found particular areas to appeal to me more than others. 

 

Creative Nonfiction was difficult for me. I found the drive to “have a point” very difficult to meet, especially when reflecting on personal experiences. Although life sometimes has a point, it's not usually obvious.

Still, I enjoyed talking about personal experiences. I have many stories, and appreciate the chance to write some of them down. It was harder than I thought, primarily because of the delicate process of choosing which details to include. In a private journal or discussion with a friend, every detail could be included. However, as this is literary, it requires the writer to be more precise. Details are tools to move the story forward, to communicate something deeper, to round out characters and ideas. There's a lot of precision and thought needed.

As I progress as a writer, and certainly when I move into works that I hope to publish, I will need to consider my audience carefully. For the purposes of this class, I considered my audience to be a collection of fellow students, of all different backrounds but of relatively similar age. I could assume that they would be interested in travel stories, not necessarily as a genre, but as coming from a classmate their age. I also could assume a relatively low level of knowledge about the cultures I have encountered, (not because of ignorance, but just because of age & life experience). Overall, I felt that most people will appreciate my writing if it is understandable, approachable, and interesting. So, during the course, I aimed to accomplish these things specifically.

The ethics of my own writing were tested as I wrote about my experiences in Mexico. Again, I kept finding it necessary to indulge in lengthy discussions of side-topics just to make sure my reader could understand the context of my point. I found it would be easier in some cases to bend the truth, or to just eliminate it, rather than pull it in.I felt it that, if my goal was to communicate my idea clearly with little distraction but still enjoyment from the interest of it, that some details were necessary to sacrifice.

I really tried to expand as a writer in this class. To me, it was the opportunity to write in a very new genre for me. The stories appealed to me, but I had never tried writing them before. One way that I stretched myself was in my writing process. I tried to use new methods for each piece, once I used “speed drafting” and another time I tried writing whatever came to mind. It was fun to try these things and see the different results.