10 thoughts on “Week 6 Takeaways”

  1. As we entered the nonfiction unit I felt scared and nervous, I was not pleased with anything I had written and had preconceived notions about fiction that I had yet to break. The exercises were helping, but I still saw fiction as something that had to be entirely fantastical, I didn’t realize there could be elements of truth, or mostly truth but only a few small things changing

  2. I enjoyed this week. I think it was nice to shift gears to fiction. It was fun to play with the nonfiction stories and try to make them as fantastical as I could. It was based on a true story but I changed this up to make it fiction.

  3. Last week’s introduction into fiction was both nerve-wracking and exciting. I found it more difficult to produce pieces that I was happy with from the in-class quick writing exercises in fiction than I did in non-fiction because I wasn’t pulling from memories, things that already happened, anymore and instead had to adjust to thinking on the spot to come up with the subjects and plot of the writing. This was unfamiliar and I think I was frustrated at first, but after having read some fiction pieces and practiced more with spontaneous fiction writing, I feel a bit more confident and I’m looking forward to the rest of the unit.

  4. I’m hesitant about fiction but I think it’ll be a good challenge. The exercises about flipping a person you could imagine into the opposite helped me a lot so I’ll probably use that again to start off stories and creates scenes.

  5. Fiction feels scary! I get caught with writing about what I know and thinking it has to evolve into non-fiction. Looking forward to going into a more fantastical/absurd place with my pieces. I think thinking about longer form stories with a beginning and end and resolution make plotting easier. It feels like short snippets leave too much to invent.

  6. I’m still having a hard time generating what I hope will be characters and a story I enjoy creating and then sharing with others. Not sure how to inspire this in myself but I did enjoy the short fiction stories and may take that approach in order to play around with mystery and reveal.

  7. Coming into the fiction unit I am both nervous and excited. I deeply enjoy creating fictional worlds and characters, but most of the time I don’t work on stories, worlds, and characters that are heavily based in our reality. With this fiction unit I want to push myself and create stories that integrate the extraordinary into ordinary life in a way that is effective and interesting. Already, I have found the exercises we have done in class extremely useful, particularly the exercise of writing a story from the perspective of a person completely opposite to myself. Exercises like this helped me start to understand and practice grounding my fictional characters and worlds in order to strike a balance between the absurd and fantastical and the ordinary.

  8. This past week, I really enjoyed finalizing my nonfiction essay and putting together my portfolio. As we move into fiction, I am a little nervous because I haven’t written in this genre very much before. There seem to be endless topic possibilities, which is what makes me a bit hesitant. In the nonfiction unit, I based my writing off of personal experiences, but now I moving away from that is daunting. However, I have enjoyed the readings so far and am looking forward to the challenge!

  9. I am pretty nervous about this fiction unit still and haven’t felt great about my first few pieces. I think this character assignment is going to really help as soon as I zero in on a potential character! Fiction is just so broad which I think makes it difficult – with nonfiction, I only had myself to worry about. I am going to try to model my essay off of a fiction story we read for this class to help me navigate. I am excited to see what fiction has in store for me!

  10. I’m coming into the fiction unit with experience writing narrative film scripts, and hoping these skills will be somewhat transferrable. I’m already feeling somewhat challenged by the differences between the mediums; I’m used to writing what I know and writing within production limits, so having things “opened up” and needing to write about more distant scenarios is quite difficult for me! I enjoyed Tuesday’s writing exercises; I think the randomized prompts we needed to use were just restricting enough to give me direction while still allowing for creative freedom. It was also fun to see what others did with the ideas we gave them! On the other hand, I found the design of Thursday’s writing exercises a little frustrating. The distant characters / POVs we were writing from were just not my style, and I don’t think I’ll be developing those pieces. I think one of my strengths in creating believable yet interesting scenarios and characters is drawing from my own experience, and I just wasn’t able to form a strong connection with the characters/scenarios generated by these prompts.

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