Letter to the Reader
Writing can be scary. It sounds silly, doesn’t it?
After all, it’s just putting words down on paper. It’s just taking ideas out of
one’s head and getting them out there for the world to see. At the same time,
there’s something terrifying about that. What if the readers don’t like what
one writes? What if they think a piece is bad? With all of these thoughts
spinning around in my head, it’s no wonder that I don’t write as much as I
should. However, during the second semester of my senior year of high school, I
took a class called “Creative Writing” that taught me something incredibly
important: writing is about taking risks.
Back at the beginning of the course, we watched
several interviews with published authors who explained the importance of
practicing writing. Writing, as they put it, is a skill like any other, and
must be worked with every day in order to improve. No one is just going to
write something amazing the first time, just as no wannabe basketball player
will make their very first basket, nor will a new violinist play a beautiful
sonata by memory the first time they pick up an instrument. Many of these
writers carry around writing notebooks, so that they can write whenever and
wherever is good for them. Some of the packets we read at the start of the
course emphasized the importance of having a set time for writing every day, in
order to add it to one’s routine. All of these tips really hit home for me: I
am not going to write a bestselling novel in one sitting. I am not going to
create my masterpiece the first go around. I need to work at writing and hone
my skills, which is a scary thing to do but a risk worth taking.
All of the risk that I took this year paid off, even
if it’s not very clear how. Even the pieces I wrote this year that didn’t come
out as well as I’d like taught me ways to improve my writing. For instance, my
second attempt at flash fiction—the original, unedited version of The
Morning Of—taught me that point of view, even in a third person story where
point of view isn’t as obvious, is critical. A story might work if told from
one character’s perspective (as that tale did from Heather’s point of view) but
fall flat from someone else’s eyes, as the original version of The Morning
Of did. My fifth attempt at flash fiction fell through because I hadn’t
planned it out enough; I didn’t really know who Lila or Reese were as
characters, and while I knew the mystery behind the golden apple, I didn’t know
how the they should factor into it. Writing that story taught me that even if a
writer wants to let the characters create a story, or if she or he wants to see
how a narrative develops as they write, there must always be some degree of
planning, however small. Without a big enough sense of direction, the story can’t
go anywhere, and that is critical.
Other risks I took both helped me grow as a writer
and made for good stories. My children’s story, The Fairy and the Centaur,
managed to tell an allegorical story without being overly preachy. I’m not a
fan of the Cloud Fairy’s speech being three pages long, but I think with a good
illustrator, those pages could remain interesting for the readers while
delivering their message. However, this story, along with my third piece of
flash fiction, Storm Marches, reminded me of one of my recurring writing
flaws: I often write long sentences with repetitious adjectives and unneeded
adverbs. It’s as if I’m trying to prove my writing skills to the audience, and
it’s something that I need to work on. However, with Storm Marches and The
Fairy and the Centaur, rereads, editing, and peer reviews proved to be
useful tools to correcting this problem. Both of these stories also happened to
be prose fiction, which I’m often afraid to write. I sometimes feel scared that
I don’t know the characters well enough, that I haven’t planned far enough
ahead, that I don’t have a tone down for each character and passage. However,
through writing these two pieces of fiction, along with my first and fourth
pieces of flash fiction (Cold and Cool
and Something Strange, Something New respectively), I learned
that when it comes to prose, I just have to practice. It’s the only way I can
ever improve, and I can always return to edit the pieces later.
I’m very proud of my portfolio. It shows my
progression through the realms of prose and flash fiction, along with small
poems that I’m very happy with. When I write poetry, I try to channel emotions
into words that others can connect to and find new meaning in. I think that the
poems, combined with my flash fiction, helps show who I am as a writer: someone
intrigued by both the ordinary and the strange, someone who wants to connect
the two, just as my blog connects poems to prose. My blog and portfolio show
that I’m already strong when it comes to poetry, but that I have lots of room
to grow in the realm of prose fiction. It’s a skill that I can’t wait to
develop.
I’m very glad that I took this course, because it
helped me to take risks and helped me to start this blog. I plan on continuing
to update it with poems, flash fiction…maybe even some longer, ongoing serial
stories. I hope that the readers are inspired to write something of their own,
because it really is the most marvelous feeling in the world to look back and
see how far one has come, and how far one can go.
Respectfully,
Joseph Drake
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