Cover Letter for Final project Submission

1. The first principle I chose is “Create Subtext” on page 327— “imagine an iceberg, part of it poking above the surface of the sea but most of it submerged.” I tried to use subtext mainly for Marians character in the story because I wanted her to be this mysterious woman that readers could only see through the eyes of my protagonist and his father. Danny saw his mom in a completely different light than Harold saw her; the subtext I tried to infer was that there was a reason Danny and his dads views are so contrasting and that is because Harold didn’t let Danny see the part of his mom where she was suffering. This is from the chapter on Insight.
   The second principle I used us from “Layering Dialogue and Action” on page 240— “people yakking away mindlessly, or people stating the obvious in direct dialogue, is not good creative writing.” I kept this in mind throughout the whole writing process and tried to use real life conversation experience to try and adapt it into my story to make it more realistic and relatable for my readers. There are many instances in my story where one character asks the other a question and, instead of responding vocally, I let the other character answer through action which I believe to be much more interesting to read than “he said this, he said that” etc. This is from the chapter on Dialogue.
   The third principle I looked at was from the chapter on Scenes, namely “Maintaining Tension” on page 228— “It’s hard to create tension with a character alone onstage, lost in thought […] Solo is boring. Two’s a game.” In my first and second submissions, I had one character alone in a lot of scenes which made the reading of my story quite boring at times, so for my final submission I decided to change that up. While there are still micro scenes where my character is alone, I added more flashbacks and changed my characters point of views to switch things up a bit to make it a more exciting read.
   The fourth principle I looked at was from the chapter on Imagery, titled “Images are the opposite of thought” on page 137— “Creative writers constantly have to work against [their] comfort zone”. Before starting this class, I had been programmed my whole life to write in essay format and have an ordered structure; however, now that I’ve been through this class, that has completely changed. It took a lot of practice to write as creatively as I’m doing now, especially since I had been told not to for the majority of my short life; I jumped over a lot of hurdles this semester with my writing that I wouldn’t have been comfortable doing if it weren’t for this class and the textbook. As of right now, I feel comfortable writing more creatively and I let it completely flow out of me when writing my final draft.
2. d) The principles I used are the following:
   • (p. 359) “Let yourself go a little bit. It’s okay to make a mess. You have to have that freedom in order to grow as a writer.” From this one, I just kept it in mind that nothing is going to be cohesive or perfect the first few times around, so I shouldn’t have to worry too much about order and structure when writing the first few drafts of anything. Its okay to let yourself go and just write whatever comes to mind and to not dwell over what you’re writing too much.

• (p. 360) “Loving your work too much or hating your work too much can be a writing block in disguise.” I struggled a lot with this principle, especially when writing the second submission to my story. I had a lot of trouble trying to get myself to let go of certain parts of my story where I just knew weren’t working and were preventing me from furthering the progress on it. In the end, I kept this quote in mind for the majority of the time that I was writing and I just told myself that my writing wont improve unless I get rid of old, bad habits like keeping my work just because I like what I wrote instead of writing something that is actually relevant to my story.

e) The main thing I tried to focus on in my revision was the relationship between my main characters. I made my characters more three-dimensional than they once were so that they could almost be seen as real people that readers can have an emotional attachment to.
f) I tried to heighten the conflict in this draft by taking my workshop peers’ advice and adding more backstory between Harold and Marians character to make it easier for my readers to understand why my characters are the way that they are and how everyone has a balance of both god and bad inside of them that they struggle with everyday.
g) I attempted to improve the dialogue by adding more actions in replacement of words so that it seemed more natural and people could relate to it more.
h) I do believe I succeeded in creating a full story with a beginning, middle, and end. I worked the hardest I’ve ever worked on a story like this before and I made sure to do everything that I could to be professional and make everything in the story smooth and work together in an efficient way.
i) I like my final version a lot better than my second submission because my second only just scratched the surface of what I wanted the end result to be. My final submission still isn’t exactly what I wanted, but I’ve come to understand that there’s always going to be room for improvement, and I need to know when to stop before it gets to be too much.
j) In this draft, I think I’m most proud of the development I made with Harold’s’ character and his relationships with his son and his wife. I made him more human and ended up really liking his character (not necessarily his actions) and why he is the way that he is. I also used the same process for Marians character that I did for Harold, only in reverse. After evaluating Harold, I realized that I might have made Marian a bit too perfect, so I changed it up a little bit; to Danny, she’s still the bubbly, caring mother that she’s always been, but now we see the other side of her which Harold tried to keep away from his son in an attempt to protect him which only resulted in a major strain in their relationship which is too far gone to be saved.
k) If I could work on this draft more, I would develop Danny’s parents back story’s a bit more and add more depth to their characters. I would also not rush the creative process as much as I did for this final submission; I’d just let the story play out and not worry too much about having some parts in prose, some in drama, and others in poetry (though doing that was fun at times).
l) The process of writing this draft was a fluctuating one in terms of creativity and figuring out how to let it flow and trying to find out what was working and what wasn’t. My writers block played a huge part throughout this process and it became somewhat overwhelming at times, to say the least; however, at other times, the creativity just flowed out of me and there were a lot of “oh, here’s what I could do next” moments that furthered the progress of my story in a quick manner.

3. m) For the “getting your work out there” requirement, I made a WordPress blog which was a little more confusing to set up than I thought it would be.
   n) I find showing other people what I write or just create in general to be very daunting. I’m a fairly private person, so showcasing something so personal to me like my writing feels very weird to me. For the “what I learnt” portion of this part, it wasn’t very much; there wasn’t this huge “epiphany” moment or anything of that manner, but I did learn to be more trusting of people and open to what they had to say about my piece which is important if I ever want to make it as a writer, author, or artist.
   o) Knowing that I was going to have to publish this piece and let it out into the world kind of held me back a bit from some things I original wanted to write; I had to pull on my reins for certain aspects of my writing, especially for Marians character and how I portrayed her. Other than little things in my writing, I didn’t really care that much about what I wrote, in terms of other peoples opinions, as long as I liked it and didn’t compromise it for an online presence of blog readers I am most likely never to meet.
   p) Some general comments I have about this experience are just that even though at the beginning of the semester I hadn’t really wanted to show my work at all to other people, I’m glad that this was a requirement because I would have never done it on my own.
4. q) We had our office meeting on the day of our optional class, but I can’t remember what the exact date was. We discussed the direction my story was heading in and how I was going to make Harold less cartoonish and villainized.