Category: Craft

Writing Weird Stuff

logan-pictureIt’s more than a little painful to read my old work, and by old, I mean both the stuff I wrote four years ago and what I wrote four days ago. It’s a constant process of asking, “What in God’s name was I thinking?” and having no response. And while this process does cause me to cringe, it also allows me to see how much I’ve moved forward in my work, how far I’ve come and how much further I can go.

            The general style of my writing has actually remained the same; I have always stayed simplistic in diction, but gotten caught up in the images of what I describe, almost like I’m writing poetry into my fiction. I think the stagnancy behind this is because that’s just the way that I write. I can alter this style after I bust out a first draft, but, to me, a story always starts out bare, aside from its visual aspects. I will admit that a great shift within my writing is that I have gained the ability to shed excessive images that mean nothing in terms of intention, though I still catch myself slipping up sometimes.

Probably the most significant change that I’ve found within my writing is that, in the midst of last year, I decided to start writing weird things. People tell you to write what you know because otherwise you’re stuck with conjecture. From my experience, that advice is total crap. I took familiar subjects and shoved them into strange situations: a girl stranded with her recently introduced half-brother in a desert, a boy stumbling across a body on a golf course, a how-to guide on communication with lost loved ones. One of my major influences in writing all this partial-nonsense comes from the book Stories You Can’t Unread by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club. The former is a collection of short stories that are completely submerged in the strange and surreal, and within these weird circumstances, I found that I was entirely interested in what the speakers had to say. I wanted to translate this interest to my own writing, so I started the process of delving into the wild, stuff that I plain hadn’t seen written before. For example, everyone has read a story about a failing marriage, but what about a failing marriage following an accident in which the wife was struck by lightning?

Through this type of exploration, I found myself more intrigued and interested in what each story has to offer; once I was hooked in writing the story and had a healthy interest in its direction, the readers also tended to gain more of an interest. I realized that I had to care about what I wrote in order for anyone else to care. So, my ultimate advice for that story that is lurking in a file somewhere, beaten down to the bones, is to make yourself interested in it again. Introduce a sick dog into the mix. Throw some aliens in. Have fun!

-Logan Monds, Social Media Editor

I Write for Me

mackenzie-steeles-pictureUnlike many of my peers in the Creative Writing department, I have only been at Douglas Anderson for two years. Also unlike many of my peers, I didn’t attend Lavilla before applying to DA. However, I did write, and it was something that I held very dear to my heart.

I hadn’t seriously written anything creative for years when I started building my audition portfolio. The last time I sat down to write was probably fifth grade, and it was almost certainly a poem about some boy I liked, or something inspired by Edgar Allen Poe – long story short, it was crappy and weird and immature. But there’s value in those pieces, a small tinge of brightness amongst the darkness of the fifth grade psyche, I guess you could say. However, fifth grade wasn’t my earliest writing; instead, it was sort of a middle ground.

I grew up living with my grandparents and it wasn’t the greatest of arrangements. I had intense depression and anger issues and so I often found solace in colorful $5 journals that could be bought at Wal-Mart or Target. That was where I let myself go – I wrote hateful, yet situationally appropriate notes to my grandparents, sad little musings about missing my mother, video game cheats, little daily scorecards that I could go back and laugh at later. No matter what I wrote, it helped me get a decent way toward catharsis, and no matter the small steps I had taken, at least I had walked some on those days.

From here, I gained an intense interest in reading – fantasies like Harry Potter and Dragon Rider, books about dogs and princesses – basically anything I could get my hands on. And from this love of reading, a love of escaping real life, writing came around. In fifth grade I started reading Poe and writing those angst-ridden fifth grade poems, and then middle school hit, soon enough, and in seventh grade, the trajectory of my writing life changed. Our teacher signed us up to do an essay contest on Korean folktales. I ended up being chosen as one of 10 or so people to be submitted as finalists from our class. And while I didn’t win, I still remember thinking that, hey, maybe this is something I’m good at. Maybe I even like it a little bit. Maybe.

While these writings were often superficial, or too blunt to be read by someone else without the solid suggestion of therapy, they all were stepping stones in my road to DA. When I got to the writing program, I was still stuck in that stiff, “make yourself look good” mode of writing, especially in Junior Fiction – I had never really written fiction before, and I was no Christopher Paolini, so I was lost in a world of trying to fake it. But I didn’t make it until I started writing about my family again, writing about things that mattered. This growth happened hugely in Junior Poetry, where I began to be okay, once again, with being blunt and emotional. And so all of my writing since has been for me, which may be selfish, but as Laurie Ann Guerrero said, “I’m working through my [crap].”

-Mackenzie Steele, Co-Art Editor

To the Trees

kiarras-blogpostThe earliest thing I remember writing and feeling distinctly attached to was a haiku I had written in the third grade about a panda that knits. Our class was learning about Japanese culture and each day of the week was revolving around some different aspect of the culture (food, kanji, etc). This was the first time I thoughtfully created a piece. I mean, I was in the first grade, and the subject matter wasn’t of course complex or earth shattering but I remember feeling good fitting into the syllable count, clapping out the sounds, and digging into my brain for the right words.

In elementary school I recall writing a lot about animals. I wrote poems about tigers and even a research paper about them in the second grade. I was compelled nature which makes sense as back then, watching Animal Planet and any documentary on the Discovery Channel was something I’d spent many weekends doing with my granddaddy. This carried into middle school, but I started also writing about things like race, and interpersonal relationships.

I find it interesting now, as I’ve noticed that who I am as a writer, revolved a lot around images that pull from nature. Last year, one of the more angry and intense poems I created was a political commentary on the state of the environment. When I write about race, I find myself gravitating towards earthy, strong, rich images as for the African American community, we are connected to the roots of the country, through blood and through innovation.

In a recent poem I’ve written about in an effort for self-exploration, I remember I created a scene with a wedding and images of butterflies and the jungle were the things I flushed out. I never thought about it, but it’s interesting that I’ve been using the natural world so long for inspiration.

I will say, in nature pandas aren’t exactly keen on knitting, but I think my point is made. I also in my writing, use a lot of colors to imply what I want to say. I notice that I use greens, blue, and yellows a lot. Colors that you immediately think of foliage, water, and light.

I think the reason I’ve always been attracted to nature in my writing, is because it always felt so much bigger than me and endless. Watching Meerkat Manor, and penguins migrate across the frozen worlds I know nothing of felt more out of this world to me than fairy tales or whatever. I notice that I subconsciously revert back to these tendencies even if I don’t mean it. Of course, the way I weave in nature inspired metaphors and images are more meaningful and are way less literal than reports on tigers or the poems I created in third grade about the beach. It’s more like in my poems about recalling childhood, the imagery of the sky and the metaphors of mountains always somehow come back to emphasizing a moment, and how small yet significant I felt in them or about the humanity and morality that is present in all of us.

-Kiara Ivey, Layout and Design Editor