B9

I liked that the first essay was an opportunity to talk about something that I never really talk about. I've never really worked with the idea of "sectioning", and I enjoyed branching out with my writing and trying something new. As a fiction writer, it was also the first time that I've ever written at any length about myself. I found it kind of exciting, which I didn't expect at all. I guess I always thought of nonfiction as boring, never considering the possibility that my own life could be as interesting as fictional stories if they were written a certain way. I think that's really what went well in my first essay - it opened my eyes to writing creative nonfiction.


If I were to revise essay 1, I think what I would work on first would be completing the story. As Dr. Chandler and I discussed in my conference, without the rest of the story, it's hard to tell exactly what purpose the story serves. As she calls it, "the aboutness" is missing. I need to write more about why the events effected me and what I gained from them. There were a lot of lessons for me that I learned through the events in the story which are as important as the stories themselves, and they need to be included in the text. What, really, do drug use, lifelong illness, and life lessons have to do with each other? There are actually a lot of things that would help tie this story together, so that would be my main focus in a second draft.


I think I want to explore some more abstract writing. There is some creative nonfiction out there that tells a story without explicitly telling a story; that's an amazing way to write, and I've never really tried it. I'm generally a pretty upfront person - so when I sit down to write, I just say what I have to say. It takes writing from an action to an art when rather than telling the story, the writer creates a poem from which the reader must suss the story out themselves. I think it would be awesome to write like that.I had an idea for my second essay, but I think I'll give myself this opportunity, instead. I'll have to think about this some more.