Week/Class 8 - Kendra

Prompt from Elmaz from a million years ago: 3 things your learned about your writing from having it reviewed this week and 3 things you learned about your writing by looking at others' works.

My writing after being reviewed:

• I focus a lot on "show don't tell" but somehow I always end up telling when I should be showing, or showing when I could just tell, and I have no idea how to handle this. I go with my gut when I'm deciding how to write some things, but after I receive feedback it gets confusing - do I take this advice or do I stick with what I feel is right?
• Messing around with style is really fun, especially when people report back on it. The two stories of Annie and Marin are structure experiments - Marin's being a block of dialogue and then a block of description, while Annie's is a bunch of description and barely any dialogue. The feedback I received on these was great because I really wanted to see how people would react to different structures, and that in turn will encourage me to push to use one of them more often.
• How much is too much and how little is too little?

My writing based on other people's work:

• I should look into spacing on the page and general style of my writing because I'm used to just writing and making paragraphs and changing the font face. I'd like to look at how I can create tone and evoke emotion from just spacing on the page, and that may come after the revision process.
• Looking at how to bring about emotion through my writing. When I read back my work, I sometimes I feel like the emotion I want to convey isn't being presented well enough if at all, and I want to play with language to see if I can become better at this.
• Go for it. Everyone in our class has a confidence that allows us to write some adventurous stuff, and I thought I was being adventurous writing about this hair-made creature thing, but I know I can push my limits and produce something just flat-out "weird" but not out of place. I'm totally inspired to write something out of my element and I hope I can do so and do more with the creature thing.

I was really hesitant coming into workshop on Friday because I felt my work was absolute garbage and I didn't want to hear any "Eh didn't like this," "This isn't needed" about things that I knew weren't needed, but I came out feeling really comfortable and okay with my work. Obviously I'm going to revise to my liking, but the feedback was helpful enough for me not to be discouraged and to keep writing.

Thank you everyone :)