Part A: You, the Writer

Before taking the Creative Writing course, I never really cared for writing all that much. I only ever wrote anything in class, and even if I tried keeping a journal, they never lasted very long. All we ever did in class was go over the format of a proper paragraph or essay, and although that is important, it wasn’t very interesting. Thanks to Creative Writing, I have been able to learn about my writing style and explore the more creative parts of my mind that I can’t really reach in a normal ELA course. I’ve been able to expand more on the ideas I come up with and become more detailed in my writing. Though I’m not as confident as I’d like to be with my writing, I have grown a lot from the beginning of the year.

Part B: You, the Blogger

Blogging wasn’t something I was really interested in, and to be honest, I still don’t really enjoy it. I probably won’t ever use my blog again after this course. It was a fun thing to try out and experience, but it really isn’t my thing and I’m really bad at keeping the habit of writing daily. I loved the inspiration I was able to find by reading the works of my classmates, especially pieces from the blogs of Alisha, Hope, and Katherine. I think I may try to write more often to help my growth as a writer, even if it won’t be posted anywhere.

Part C: You the Student

During class, I really enjoyed when we had pictures up on the board and we just wrote whatever we could come up with. Doing this really helped me to create stories and ideas I never would have thought up otherwise. Also being able to sit in groups with people I’m comfortable with was able to help me exchange ideas and get feedback to make my writing even better. As a reader, I’ve been reading higher level novels and exploring genres that I’m not usually a fan of to help me improve my writing. For example Dune by Frank Herbert was a sci-fi novel, but I found it so interesting and was able to enjoy it completely. Reading gives me inspiration for my own works and makes me want to be a better writer. I have a big list of books waiting to be read including  Milk & Honey by Rupi Kaur along with Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng, Girl, Stolen – April Henry, Pretty Girls – Karin Slaughter, and Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden.

Part D: You, the Fan

Studying Ransom Riggs has helped me to not be afraid of writing about darker topics and writing about whatever weird things I can think up. It was nice to go back and reread one of my favourite series and actually take my time to really understand it. I learned how important it is to be myself in my writing and to not be afraid to take on difficult topics. I would love to read more from Rupi Kaur as well as trying out flash poetry. One of my favourite series is Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas which currently has 5 books and one novella. I think one of the reasons I love it so much is because of the development of both the characters and the story, and it has become a great inspiration for me since I’ve been following it for a couple years now. Another one of my favourite books is Life After Life by Libba Bray. I found this book so interesting because of the approach it takes on being reborn because the main character, Ursula, gets taken back to the day she was born every time she dies. She can’t remember any of her past lives but always gets a bad feeling if the situation she died in before happens again, so she does her best to keep them from happening even if she doesn’t know why.

Part E: You, the Critic of your work

The first piece I will be talking about is my About Me . This was my very first piece that was created and posted in Creative Writing, and I wrote it at the beginning of the year when I was going through a hard time. It shows a bit of how I was feeling at the beginning of the year and what I was going through. It was easy to write because I just sort of let all of my feelings out without thinking too much about it. I would like to go back and edit to show how I’m in a much better place of mind now and to write about something positive and happy.

The second piece I will be talking about is a short piece called Puppets of Society. This was the first free choice I did for this course, so I wasn’t really sure about what to write about and how long to make it. As a result, I think it’s one of the shortest pieces on my blog, so I think I would like to go back and work on it and to see how much my writing has changed from the beginning of the year. This story is about a teenage girl who doesn’t want to become another clone of the popular celebrities, and just simply wants to be herself. I was really lost on what to write, but Elissa helped by saying to write about something I could relate to or have experienced. I try to be proud of who I am and don’t want to change my personality just because it’s different from everyone else. I was proud of myself for being able to write this and even think up something like this, but now I just want to go back and make it better.

The last piece I want to talk about is my most recent piece, The Girl In The Sky. It’s about a girl who lives in the sky and her only purpose is to guide the sky to move properly, but she has never known family or love. She has grown tired of living the same life every day, and the sky has become so polluted because she has become forgotten by the people down below. She wishes to be able to live a normal life and leave the sky behind, and in the end, she gets her wish, but not quite in the way she was expecting.  I feel like this piece really shows my growth from the beginning of the year, and I’m the most proud of it. I surprised myself by writing this, and was not expecting this outcome at all. It just shaped itself as I wrote and became longer than I thought it would be and even had a completely different ending than I had originally planned out.