Of all of the assignments we have been given thus far, I feel that this last poetry assignment was by far the most difficult for me. There are quite a few reasons that I felt this way, but the biggest reason of all was because of how hard I struggle with writing poetry. Besides the fact that poetry is one of my weaker areas of writing, I also found that a lot of the reason I struggled so much was because of previous word choices in my tweets and microfiction.
When we were first assigned the microfiction stories, I had some mixed emotions about the whole thing. On one hand, I had experience with microfiction, and not only that, but I really enjoyed writing microfiction. On the other hand, I was a little stressed because I knew I was going to have to come up with two different story ideas, and I was also going to have to work the two quotes into them. Although I love to write microfiction, I absolutely hate trying to come up with story ideas. For me, the most difficult part of writing the microfiction was getting the first line down. It seems like after I write the first line, the rest of the story just unfolds as I go. Actually, it’s funny because I remembered thinking to myself how amazing it was that I could start a story with one idea but end up with something completely different. I had no idea who I wanted my characters to be or how I wanted the story to end, but it all seemed to just fall into place as I wrote.
Even though I struggled a lot less after I came up with my ideas, I still encountered a few other issues when writing my stories. The main issue was that I had a really difficult time trying to use good descriptive language without exceeding the 250 word limit. In the past when I wrote microfiction, our limit was 500 words, so even though I had an idea of what to expect for this assignment, I still had to adjust to the idea that I had half the amount of words to work with. As I started to write my first story, I was focused on using a lot of color and imagery when describing the setting, but I quickly realized that in order for me to actually tell the story and give it a decent ending, I had to cut out anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary to the story line (and store it into my “good shit” file until a later time). I was both frustrated and disappointed because I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate the best of both into my story. Overall, I was pleased with the outcome of my stories, and not just that, but I appreciated how it challenged me as a writer and helped me to see exactly what areas I need to work on in my writing.
As I had previously mentioned, the poems were definitely far more difficult than the microfiction. I was pretty pleased with the haiku poem, but I also knew that it probably could have been better if I had used more evocative words in my microfiction. As for the Found poem, I wasn’t sure where to begin so I tried to pull the tweets that contained the most useful words, but my issue wasn’t so much the words, it was more my creativity, or better yet, lack thereof. Although my haiku was unrelated to my microfiction, my Found poem did end up relating to my tweets, because many of them had to do with comments I had made pertaining to the weather. Once I noticed this theme within my tweets, it served as my inspiration for the poem. Overall, I think that experimenting with these different genres was an excellent learning experience for me because I was pushed out of my usual comfort zone, and I was forced to evaluate each and every word before deciding to use it, which has added to my growth as a writer.
When we were first assigned the microfiction stories, I had some mixed emotions about the whole thing. On one hand, I had experience with microfiction, and not only that, but I really enjoyed writing microfiction. On the other hand, I was a little stressed because I knew I was going to have to come up with two different story ideas, and I was also going to have to work the two quotes into them. Although I love to write microfiction, I absolutely hate trying to come up with story ideas. For me, the most difficult part of writing the microfiction was getting the first line down. It seems like after I write the first line, the rest of the story just unfolds as I go. Actually, it’s funny because I remembered thinking to myself how amazing it was that I could start a story with one idea but end up with something completely different. I had no idea who I wanted my characters to be or how I wanted the story to end, but it all seemed to just fall into place as I wrote.
Even though I struggled a lot less after I came up with my ideas, I still encountered a few other issues when writing my stories. The main issue was that I had a really difficult time trying to use good descriptive language without exceeding the 250 word limit. In the past when I wrote microfiction, our limit was 500 words, so even though I had an idea of what to expect for this assignment, I still had to adjust to the idea that I had half the amount of words to work with. As I started to write my first story, I was focused on using a lot of color and imagery when describing the setting, but I quickly realized that in order for me to actually tell the story and give it a decent ending, I had to cut out anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary to the story line (and store it into my “good shit” file until a later time). I was both frustrated and disappointed because I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate the best of both into my story. Overall, I was pleased with the outcome of my stories, and not just that, but I appreciated how it challenged me as a writer and helped me to see exactly what areas I need to work on in my writing.
As I had previously mentioned, the poems were definitely far more difficult than the microfiction. I was pretty pleased with the haiku poem, but I also knew that it probably could have been better if I had used more evocative words in my microfiction. As for the Found poem, I wasn’t sure where to begin so I tried to pull the tweets that contained the most useful words, but my issue wasn’t so much the words, it was more my creativity, or better yet, lack thereof. Although my haiku was unrelated to my microfiction, my Found poem did end up relating to my tweets, because many of them had to do with comments I had made pertaining to the weather. Once I noticed this theme within my tweets, it served as my inspiration for the poem. Overall, I think that experimenting with these different genres was an excellent learning experience for me because I was pushed out of my usual comfort zone, and I was forced to evaluate each and every word before deciding to use it, which has added to my growth as a writer.
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