Diving Back In

If you remember in my last post, I mentioned I was trying to ease back into reading books that I wanted to read rather than what was required for my classes. I stated the tower of books on my dresser stretched to ten (plus three books on my Kindle). It was down to seven, I believe, once June hit.

Well. I then added four books to that tower throughout the month of June. It seemed like every time I finished one, another was added.

But! I found that once I started reading these wonderful books, I churned them out quickly. (Not because I needed to shrink my book pile down as quickly as possible, but because the stories drew me in.)

And in the end, I managed to start and complete seven books during the course of June (for a total of 2,398 pages).

So now I’m down to only three books in stack. Hooray!

Are you confused by the math yet?

I feel like June was “Month of Stories” for me. I obviously did a ton of reading and in between that, I took six days off of this activity to binge-watch the first two seasons of The 100 (I need season 3, Netflix!). Also, this past Sunday marked the end of Game of Thrones until next year. (What am I going to do with myself on Sunday nights now? The Walking Dead, which is also on Sundays, doesn’t start up again until October.)

It’s safe to say that I accomplished reading again since school ended. However, I have yet to do any writing.

And when I say that, I mean, other than all the stories I had to write as class assignments, I haven’t written anything for myself since November. November! When I finished and won NaNoWriMo.

It has been seven months.

This is not okay.

I found, in the past, if I go 2-3 months without creatively writing something, I become restless to type something out. But then I freeze up, scared to write again. As if all of my skills could fly out of the window in those short months.

For the past three years, I had a writing project to do in the summer. This year, I got nothing.

So yesterday, I made the decision that I’m going to do my own version of Camp NaNoWriMo (which occurs during the month of July). It’s a good motivator in order to force me to write again.

I have no idea what I’m going to write about, though. I get the feeling that if I tried to focus on one story, I’ll end up repeating what I did last November. You know, start with one story, hit a road block and no longer become interested in it, and then start a new story until I find one that sticks.

My goal is to write at least 1,000 words a day during the month of July (simple math, total end goal for the word count: 31,000). That’s do-able, right?

I guess we’ll have to see what the month of July will bring.




P.S. How in the world is tomorrow July already? Half of the 2016 year is over? Whaaaat??

Randomness 3

Guess who has a blog post of completely random things once again? (It has been an interesting month so far, not being in school and all. But because of that, I feel like my thoughts are all over the place, hence this seemingly aimless list.)

Things that I have been enjoying lately:

1.) Summer weather!

I can just see all of you right now. Rolling your eyes at me. Look at this girl, desperate for a topic to talk about. The weather! C’mon. To you I say, try living in Michigan. The temperature was averaging in the forties about two weeks ago and then – bam! – we hit 70s/80s all at once. What happened to the temperatures in between?

Anyway, because of this, I’ve now begun to do all those fun summery things. Like plant flowers (and unfortunately, pull a ton of weeds). And bike rides. And go to the beach (my sister and I plan on doing this tomorrow).

2.) Commencement Speeches

Okay, I can see those eye rolls again. But seriously, there have been some seriously good commencement speeches this year. Here are my two favorites:

a.) John Green’s Learn to Listen:

“You are about to be a nobody. And that’s important, because when you become a somebody, if you can remember what it was like to be a nobody, you won’t be a jerk.”

b.) Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Speech:

“The simple truth is this: Every story you choose to tell, by necessity, omits others from the larger narrative…This act of choosing—the stories we tell versus the stories we leave out—will reverberate across the rest of your life.”

3.) Books

I’ve slowly been trying to get back into reading. After being forced to read particular books every day for eight months for school, I wanted to take a break. (Although, to be fair, half the time they weren’t all that bad.) I had a stack of ten books sitting on my dresser that I’ve collected since last October (not to mention the three free books on my Kindle). I managed to plow through three of those books, so my pile is finally shrinking…but I’m also anticipating a new book in the mail to arrive sometime this week.

So many books, so little time.

And in case you were curious, I’m currently in the middle of UNBOUND by Neal Shusterman. Gotta love the creepiness of the Unwind world. I’m enjoying the various short stories that go into the backstories of various characters.

Also! I am super pumped for Veronica Roth’s new book that will be published in January (ugh, why so far away?).


4.) Music

During the end of April, my laptop surprised me and went through a mandatory update to Windows 10. In doing so, it downloaded all these songs that I had hidden away and forgotten about on iTunes and reappeared on my computer music file. So now I’ve been listening to all these songs that I had previously brushed aside and it has given me something new to listen to.

Also, I was pretty excited when Skillet released their two new songs last week in order to promote their next album being released in August. I’ve been listening to “Feel Invincible” and “Stars” on repeat since then.



So, yeah, that’s basically what I’ve been up to this past month. (Okay, not really. I do somewhat have a life. Sort of.)

Something Beautiful

First of all, I’m officially on my summer break now! Huzzah! I can’t believe that I’ve already completed an entire year of school. Only one more semester to go…

You know how sometimes you get told certain things over and over again that after a while, they lose their impact? But then one day, it hits you like a train and you rediscover this particular fact/advice all over again like it’s the first time? (I feel like there must be a word for this feeling in the English dictionary…I just don’t know it. If there is, please enlighten me.)

I’ve read plenty of online articles and author opinions over the years that mention how all writing is never wasted. Even bad writing. Because you can learn something from every piece that you write.

But for some reason, this idea popped into my head last night and I’ve been mulling it over ever since. Maybe because I’ve been reflecting about these past few months? (Does anyone else think back to what they’ve learned after a semester of school? No? What about the kind of people that you met while meeting in the same room multiple times in a week? Anyone?)

At any rate, I thought back to the stories (and poems) that I wrote this past semester and there are few of them where I scratch my head and wonder, “Why did I write that? That’s not a good reflection of the work I can do.” But at that time, I must have, because I wouldn’t have turned it in as an assignment otherwise.

It made me wonder about what I saw in those pieces. What was it that made me cringe? It’s usually different for each work, so I can’t make a sweeping statement about them for you, but it’s interesting to think about.

And I definitely have to get better at not feeling embarrassed about my “bad” pieces.

Because, yeah, you can argue about what is considered “good” writing and you can point out story inconsistencies and grammatical errors and the list goes on and on. (The trick is to just have as little amount of faults as possible. Yes, all first drafts are pretty terrible. But some written work is more likely to be published than others. Why am I getting ANIMAL FARM flashbacks??)

However, I believe that there is a nugget of goodness in all writing. The act of writing takes work and there’s a part of your soul that you inserted into the piece that made it yours. And that is beautiful.

This doesn’t simply apply to writing. Basically any craft can have this viewpoint.

I’m trying to remind myself that, no matter what I write, I make beautiful things. I have something to learn with even the stories I would rather lock inside my laptop forever.

So my advice: Make something beautiful!

The Inner Turmoil of a Writer

My screenwriting professor last semester once made a comparison between a particular scene in Disney’s Tangled and being a writer. You know what scene I’m talking about? It’s the one where, upon leaving the castle for the first time, Rapunzel goes back and forth on deciding whether to continue on her journey or head back for home before her mother notices her disappearance.

Quotes from Rapunzel in this segment of the movie:

“I can’t believe I did this!”

“Oh my gosh. This would kill her.”

“This is so fun!”

“I. Am. A horrible daughter. I’m going back.”

“I’m never going back!”

“I am a despicable human being.”

Yeah, us writers feel this bipolar-ness when it comes to our own work.

I have been swinging from one side to another about my craft for years, so that’s nothing new. However, I feel like I’ve been all over the place lately. Someone will compliment my writing and it’ll make me feel great, but then a particular feedback comment will make me feel like I have a long way to go still. (Why is it that some days I love feedback and other days absolutely detest it?)

For example, I had another short story of mine workshopped in class last week. I was already nervous about it because it had a different format than my last one and I was worried that my classmates wouldn’t “get” a few things that were going on within it.

For the most part, my classmates said good things about it (and that’s always nice to hear). But then people started to get super picky about certain lines that weren’t working. Part of me goes, “Great! That’s an easy fix. I can do that.” And then another part of me goes, “Is the writing/story really that bad?”

Of course, it didn’t help that my professor decided to sit next to me. I kept glancing at all the marks and final feedback notes that he’d do for me and my other two classmates that also had their stories read. My biggest competitor in the class happened to have his story read on the same day as mine, so guess who fell down the rabbit hole for the rest of the class?

Statements/Questions that entered my mind during this time:

“All these nitpicky notes on my story must be a good thing, right? Because my professor did this to my other story, too (the one that he loved). He doesn’t really go into this much depth with other people’s stories.”

“Who am I kidding? Look at the detail that my rival did with his story!”

“Why do my professor’s final notes for my story look different than my competitor’s? Mine consist of four small paragraphs and the other guy has one huge paragraph? Maybe it’s just because his story was eleven more pages than mine? And am I really analyzing the format of feedback?”

“It looks like there are more slashes on my draft than on my rival’s. That can’t be good, right?”

…

“What if everyone is just lying to me?”

You’d think that all this paranoia would remain in my workshops. (I’m not going to count my poetry workshop because I don’t really care much about my poems. Sorry.) But it doesn’t.

I get told by the Creative Writing director that I have “excellent writing skills” (all I did was send her an e-mail…), but then later deflate upon realizing that I didn’t win anything in a particular writing contest.

Up. Down. Left. Right. Forward. Back.

Writing is hard.

The trick is to find your own Flynn Rider from Tangled. You know, someone who will walk with you on your journey toward your dreams. Even if it involves reverse psychology.

Everything and Nothing

I did not think that it’d take me this long to write my first blog post of the year.

I spent all of January trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to write for January’s post. I mean, it’s the first blog of the 2016 year. I better make it interesting and thoughtful and fun and all the good things.

Note to future self: Don’t think too hard about these things, trying to make it perfect, because otherwise I will continue to push it off and not do anything about it.

So now here I am, the 21st of February, finally writing something. Although, to be fair, I’ve had a busy (with schoolwork) and rough (because of health issues) month.

Guess who still doesn’t quite have a particular blog topic? This girl! So instead, you get a list of things that I’ve been pondering this year.

1.) Prose poems

So I currently have a poetry class this semester. It has been an interesting experience so far, mainly because I knew going into the class that I wasn’t much of a poet. (I can appreciate poetry, but I can’t write it well.)

Anyway, I was introduced to prose poems and they confuse the heck out of me. They look like any other paragraph to me, whether that means a short story condensed into a paragraph or a paragraph extracted from an essay.

Just tell me what you are! You are like the chimera of the poetry world to me.

2.) Short-short stories (otherwise known as “micro-short” stories, in Amanda terminology)

I also have a Creative Writing workshop this semester. On your designated week, you must pass out copies of your story for it to be workshopped the following week. In order to save my classmates the pain of reading a 7+ page story (and because I also don’t want to read out loud to the class that much), I’ve had to resort back to writing micro-short stories (stories that are 1000 words or less).

Back in 2012, that’s pretty much the format that I wrote all my stories. However, after that, I started to write lengthier pieces and I haven’t really gone back. Now I’m forced to do it and it’s harder than I remembered. I mean, how do I find the balance of creating enough details for the story without weighing it down within its small body?

I guess I found a way after all, judging by the positive feedback that I got from my first story three days ago. Let’s just hope that I can repeat it.

3.) Why does literary fiction constantly get re-made?

I’m just thinking out loud here.

But seriously, how many remakes or spin-offs can you think of that is based off of a Jane Austen novel? (I’ve always wondered what she’d think about it. For me, personally, I’d be flattered.)

At first I thought that maybe it was because, even though the actual story is great, it leaves room for other creative ideas to merge into the story since it’s literary fiction. (I’m looking at you, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.)

However, you could make the argument that Shakespeare has undergone so many remakes too, but his stories always have some kind of fantastical elements to them (ghosts, witches, fairies).

On the flip side, does anyone know of any books that were originally set in fantasy/sci-fi/whatever and remade into literary fiction?

I mean, can you imagine the Harry Potter series being literary fiction? No magic at all, just an outcast boy that attends a public school with his annoying cousin. (That actually sounds interesting now…if anyone pursues this idea and makes it entertaining, I want to read it.)

4.) Hair

Yeah, this is totally random.

But seriously, I keep feeling like I need to do something different with my hair.

As you can tell by my new profile picture, my bangs have grown out. They’re not officially side bangs, but they’re getting there.

I was thinking of letting them become side bangs, but a small part of me still wants to have the straight-cut bangs.

I’ve also contemplated on trying to curl my hair more often, but then I remembered that I don’t know how to properly curl my hair.

And now I’m entertaining the idea of possibly cutting my hair up to my shoulders. Will I be brave enough to do it in the summer? (I haven’t had my hair that short since 3rd grade.) Do I do it after I graduate with my B.A. as a kind of “onto the next stage of my life”? Will this kind of hair-cut actually compliment my face? And if I actually go through with this, do I keep the side bangs or go back to straight-cut?

So many options. I’m so confused.

Side note: I don’t plan on dyeing my hair.



Huh. I guess most of my topics listed above are somewhat related to one another. What are your thoughts on any of the four subjects?

(The struggle that was) NaNoWriMo '15

Last month was the annual National Novel Writing Month. As you may have ventured a guess from past posts found in this blog, I participated once more.

And the struggle was real, you guys.

Seeing that 2015 is a year that ends with an odd-number, I decided that I was going to focus on one particular story for the entire month (instead of a collection of short stories). During the last two weeks of October, I had a kernel of an idea and focused on sketching out the characters and setting so that I wouldn’t stumble over these details when I started writing. I didn’t have much of a plan (I know! I’m a planner) of how I wanted the story to go, but I figured that that was the joy of NaNo. I was going to be spontaneous.

I knew that I was in trouble when I started flailing on day 3.

By the end of day 2, I hit a road block with my story. No big deal. Whenever that happens, you should skip ahead to a scene that you do want to write and then fill in the blanks later.

After day 3, I was at a total lost. I had no idea what to do with this story. I just had all these random scenes.

So I caved in and deviated from that story to work on a short story instead. I figured that taking a step back would be helpful.

I wrote three short stories and I think in my heart, I really wanted to write some kind of road-trip story. So on day 7, I set out writing an adventure/comedy about the Oregon Trail.

Turns out, that was the story that stuck.

Most likely, things weren’t historically accurate. (I was doing research on the spot and didn’t sweat it too much because I knew that this story was not something that will probably ever leave my laptop. I also may or may not have played one game of The Oregon Trail to give me possible story ideas.) I did look at a map of the journey across the country and had my fictional family follow that.

I worked on this story until day 27. I didn’t stop because I ran out of ideas (although, I did blow through many of the possible conflicts that I had written down). I stopped because I was growing tired of the story. I really wanted to keep it going until the 30th, but I just couldn’t do it.

So for the remainder of the month, I worked on another short story.

In the end, my grand total word count was…

51,177 words!!!

I was only 942 words shy of last year’s, but I think I was just aiming to win again.

Because in addition to all the NaNo struggle, I wasn’t getting much sleep as I tried to incorporate NaNo time with school, homework, and some kind of social life. I did indeed write at least 1667 words daily during the month, but I was not very good with time management. I made time to write by either spending an hour in the college library in between classes to crank words out and by postponing homework until NaNo was done for the day. That word count needs to be updated before midnight, you know.

I won, but it was tough this year. I don’t think I’ve ever been so relieved to see December 1st.

But at least I have this to show for my struggles:

^ Ignore the awkward lighting from my desk lamp.

Specificity

In the month that I’ve officially been back in school, it’s amazing how it seems like I’ve been at this university for years. As strange as this may sound, I’m having a great time. I have one class where we do story writing - and sometimes poetry - exercises. Another, I spend discussing books (it’s like a more in-depth book club). And the last one, I get to learn about writing for film. The only exams I have to worry about are occasional reading quizzes (super easy).

I don’t want to bore you anymore about the details of my classes, but basically I just wanted to say that it’s not a bad set-up.

I’ve also learned a few things already when it comes to my writing. Like how I should remember to incorporate other senses in my fiction writing other than sight (and hearing, because I tend to lean heavily on this, too).

But mainly, I need to remind myself to be more specific.

In my creative writing class, I do a pretty good job of this. However, when it comes to essay writing in my other class, I’ve noticed a repeated theme in my critique footnotes. I have to stop being so vague and explain what I mean by certain phrases/quotes. I can’t expect readers to understand precisely what I write if I don’t properly clarify. Just like lack of details in stories lead to an incomplete picture, general explanations can lead to an incomplete comprehension. So I’m trying to wed my classes together with this idea of specificity.

Who knew that my Creative Writing class was going to help me with academic papers?

Anyway, get specific with your stories! Use all five senses (unless you have a sixth sense, then use that, too). Use names and numbers. Refine that word choice and add texture!

Textured details make life exciting. Just look at all the exclamations points I included in the paragraph above.

Because at the end of the day, an exciting story leads to satisfied readers.