This week we were asked to write and share our own stories, and to read a new one called "The Girl With The Blackened Eye". As we are moving forward with fiction and all of the elements to a good short story, I am really starting to see how best to put my ideas to use. I never really thought about how to write a short story, I always just went with my gut. This can be good sometimes, but I am really liking knowing some different techniques. When we were asked to write a story, we used a fiction exercise to get our ideas flowing. I am also getting really good ideas from the various short stories that we have been reading. They have shown me that a story has many different definitions and ways it can go. The Girl With the Blackened Eye was very different from what I am used to reading, but I really enjoyed it. It's really weird to me that something painful sounding and terrible could be so good to read. I'm going to talk about the short stories I have been working on and "The Girl With the Blackened Eye".
The fiction exercise that we did in class asked us to describe a place, emotion, and thing without saying what it is. This was way harder for me than I thought. I liked it though, because it gets the brain in the habit of using show instead of tell to describe things. It also really got a lot of ideas in my head about what kind of story I was going to write. When I did the exercise, I sort of wrote each thing in some form of prose instead of doing it 'high and dry'. I love poetry, and feel like I can't write a story without at least a little bit of it. I'm hoping it will help me be able to extend what I wrote, because of the two stories I have, they are both extremely short. The first little buds of a story will hopefully be translated into something more developed. I chose to describe anxiety as one of my emotions because I suffer from it. It's so hard to describe, but because I feel it everyday, it is a bit easier. This emotion really gave me good ideas for character development as well, because I could use the emotion of anxiety to describe the person. Not saying 'anxiety' also really makes for good development. I'm really interested to see where I will go with these two stories. I feel like they are in the middle of a story instead of having a clear beginning, middle and end, so hopefully I can work on this.
The Girl With the Blackened Eye was a really powerful story. It had a lot of terrible images, but perhaps that's why I was so enthralled in it. I couldn't look away the whole time I was reading it. I had to know what was going to happen, even though I knew the main character was going to survive. The imagery played into this a lot. When an author is good at describing stuff, it doesn't really matter what the story is about, as long as it is done effectively. Everything we have read has played into this, which further reinforces me to write like this in my own stories. There was a line in the story that really stuck out to me on page 207: "When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love." For some reason when I read this I knew exactly what she was talking about. Giving up struggle is relieving in some ways. Even if it means the end is near, that struggle is no longer there to bother you. I've dealt with this a lot in my short life so far. It's difficult to describe. It's like an idea that you feel really strongly about or something you are constantly fighting yourself about that finally comes to you just letting it go. Realizing that you have no control. Then you are satisfied, even if the end result is not getting what you want. It's strange to feel satisfaction in failure, but I think that's exactly what the person in the story is trying to get at. It's not love, it's a wave of relief because you don't have to defend yourself in some way. It's acceptance in your situation. She talks about how she didn't really know how long she was gone, she just lived. Night and day didn't exist to her, it could have been 80 days for all she knew. That is the most raw form of living life to the fullest. She did even thought it wasn't for good. Her life existed as a mono day and night. Survival was a blessing, the next minute she was alive was a relief. I can't imagine any of those feelings. I feel like we as humans live our lives for the next day. We think about what we need to do for the next day instead of the day we are presently in. It's so frustrating to just want the days to pass instead of being able to enjoy every moment and be grateful that the next one came.
This week was really intense for me as a writer. My stories are starting to come alive the more we read and do fiction exercises. I really can't get enough of them because I truly want to create something great. I know it takes time, but I want the effort to show.
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