I've had an online journal for a very long time. I was always up-to-date with it, but after a while, my ability to keep it timely faded into obscurity. I tried to keep a written journal for one year....every day there was an entry, hand written, with little mementos from the days....receipts, coupons, movie tickets, flower petals,, etc. I've always held onto mementos though...bottled drops of rain from my 18th birthday....y'know...simple things....I am trying to become more persistent with the online journal though. What I wanted to work on in this class with my writing was my ability to detail events and scenarios. With fiction, you can grab the reader quite easily with all the fake stuff you're allowed to write about. With non-fiction however, you’ll have to turn a sometimes mundane experience into something quite extraordinary. This was hard for me in the beginning of the class but after a while I was able to develop a craft for myself to grab the reader easier with a good use of adjectives.
I have no plans for participating in a writers group. I'm a loner at heart with basically everything. I don't do clubs or conferences or meetings. There is no "I" in team, but there is one in "equipo"....and that is Spanish for team. I do understand that if I were to write for movies and etc. I would have to work with others, but that would most likely be in sense of moderation.
I want to be involved in film as a producer, director and a screenplay writer. Writing is a must obviously for writing scripts, and being a good writer helps the actors who have to read your work and act it out. How you convey what you want on the screen in words affects the final product.
Things I want to write that won't benefit me are probably just personal essays and literary journalism about the world and people and life and such. On my website, www.thecshop.org, I am constantly writing entries regarding our exploits. That's life.
I don't really expect any of my writing to get published by big name companys like J.K Rowling. I don't think I'll sit there and try to enter a contest or anything like a publication to get my work on there. If it happens it just happens.
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Blog 17 - What I Have So Far
When I thought about the subject matter for my personal essay, skateboarding was the first thing that came to mind. Skateboarding is a huge part of my life and affects a lot of the other facets of my personality. It affects the music I listen to, a bunch of other things as well as how I view the rest of the world. It also affects how the rest of the world views me. The essay was basically meant to be about the writer, and you can learn a lot about me based on my skating; especially when it is compared and contrasted with my past and present self. Skateboarding shaves off a little bit of the fear factor we’re all born with. As I grew through my skating, I grew as a person mentally and physically. I decided to use this as my focus. From my initial paragraph I decided what I would focus the whole essay on. I didn't want what I had to say to come out in a blunt fashion either, so I had to be careful and use metaphors and other literary devices.
I usually type in my room, on my bed. Sometime with the television on and something with no real substance playing…like a skate video. Either that or a movie I’ve seen a billion times already and know like the back of my hand. Whatever it is, I want something playing that I am not going to focus on entirely. My focus would be split between my typing and the action going on the screen in front of me. If I find that my focus is wavering against my writing, I turn off the television and focus completely on my writing. I let it pour from my fingertips and onto the page erratically. Every now and then I’ll get the red squiggly line of shame underneath misspelled words and hit F7 to correct them. More times then not, it was slang not featured in the Microsoft Word Dictionary.
As this essay came to fruition, I had to make sure I was using tense correctly due to the fact that the essay was in the past, but with one event taking place farther back in the past than the other. I also had to be careful with terminology that a large audience not familiar with skateboarding would be able to understand. The fact that the paper dealt with skateboarding meant I had to be careful where I tread and betray my use of terms I am very much familiar with. Words like “kickflip” and “360 Flip” were changed to “the board flipped over twice, returning to its original arrangement” and “the board rotated a full three hundred and sixty degrees” respectively. Most of my edits were in reference to this cryptic dialog. It was really hard trying to convey something I was so familiar with to and audience that didn’t share the same acquaintance to skateboarding that I had had for years.
I usually type in my room, on my bed. Sometime with the television on and something with no real substance playing…like a skate video. Either that or a movie I’ve seen a billion times already and know like the back of my hand. Whatever it is, I want something playing that I am not going to focus on entirely. My focus would be split between my typing and the action going on the screen in front of me. If I find that my focus is wavering against my writing, I turn off the television and focus completely on my writing. I let it pour from my fingertips and onto the page erratically. Every now and then I’ll get the red squiggly line of shame underneath misspelled words and hit F7 to correct them. More times then not, it was slang not featured in the Microsoft Word Dictionary.
As this essay came to fruition, I had to make sure I was using tense correctly due to the fact that the essay was in the past, but with one event taking place farther back in the past than the other. I also had to be careful with terminology that a large audience not familiar with skateboarding would be able to understand. The fact that the paper dealt with skateboarding meant I had to be careful where I tread and betray my use of terms I am very much familiar with. Words like “kickflip” and “360 Flip” were changed to “the board flipped over twice, returning to its original arrangement” and “the board rotated a full three hundred and sixty degrees” respectively. Most of my edits were in reference to this cryptic dialog. It was really hard trying to convey something I was so familiar with to and audience that didn’t share the same acquaintance to skateboarding that I had had for years.
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