Writing

Friday, August 13, 2004

Classes are going pretty well now.  I dropped Modern Lit.  I enjoyed the things we ere reading, but it was time consuming, and it's rather annoying going from upper-level English major classes to a lit class with various non-majors complaining about how long things are.  Besides, I still have twelve hours without it, and there's no need to bother with a class I don't need anyhow.  It's so nice to have a break.

I'm really enjoying the Western Heritage class.  It's a lot of cultural history, mostly, and it's really interesting.  We're learning about art, architecture, philosophy, and history, all intertwined.

I finished the book I brought, Barbara Kingsolver's Homeland.  It's a collection of short stories.  I really enjoy her work, and I think it will help me when I write my short story for creative writing, as her style is close to what I'd like to write myself.  I have a few starts for it, but I guess the hard part is writing something that will be interesting and coherent to everyone who has to read it.  The class reading my writing in Advance Comp wasn't a big deal because it was just more non-fiction--essays and term papers and such, like I've been writing for years now.  But this--no one but my mother, that I know of, has ever read anything fiction I wrote, well, besides a few poems and some stories when I was very little. 

The more I think about writing, the more things I remember writing as a child.  The first I remember was about a girl, her older brother, and her mother, but I remember nothing about the plot; Mom says she still has it somewhere.  Then there were the stories of Janella the Bear, and some I wrote in Gifted.  There was one that was something about someone who fell in a pit.  Of course I illustrated them all.  In fifth grade, I had a whole folder of story ideas--I loved to create characters.  I remember one about a mother of six who crashed her care over a cliff and landed on a ledge which opened into a cave, and how she survived, and how her children refused to accept her disappearance and finally found her.  I started my first novel that year, too, and called it "Together but Alone," which of course sounds corny now but seemed clever at the time.  It was a bout a family who won a trip on a cruise ship.  The shop crashed while at sea, and the three daughters were separated from the parents and were stranded along with a few other children on an island, and how they survived.  I had quite a bit written and typed it on the computer at school in what was supposed to be my "gifted" time, although it was more just a way to keep me busy because they didn't know what to do with me. 

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