Part A

 

As a writer I feel as though I have improved a lot since last year, and I am much more confident in my writing now. I wrote my first play this year for class acts, and it gave me inspiration to try out different genres, like drama and comedy instead of always writing romance. The ideas I get now compared to last year are much deeper and based on the human condition and conflict within one’s self, rather than the superficial ideas I used to have. My structure has improved too as I’ve explored different sentence types and seeing how I can make my writing flow. I also use a lot more symbolism, alliteration, etc. to make my pieces seem more poetic. My voice has become more intellectual and more heartfelt. I continuously try to play with the idea of writing with both the heart and mind to create a more human tone. No Red Ink and Grammarly have helped me improve my GUMPS and avoid mistakes that can draw a reader out of my work.

 

Part B

 

I enjoy the aesthetic I created with my blog this year. The monochromatic background and images are the foundation for what I tried to create. I wanted my writing to bring the colour in my blog instead of pictures. The moving eyes GIF that I set as my background symbolizes the eyes of those that are watching me grow and develop as a reader. (to be continued)

 

Part C

 

Creating relatable characters. All of the films/TV I’ve watched and books I’ve read this semester have taught me how I should be writing my characters. Even if my character is nothing like the reader, I learned to make my characters not all good or evil, but to make them a mix of both, to make them grey. Doing this helps readers sympathize with characters even if they want to dislike them, or to doubt characters that they want to like.

 

Our presentation from Lucas Goldsmith was an epiphany for me. His lesson on philosophy and it’s relation to writing enticing plots helped me change my way of thinking.

 

The best book I read this semester was A Game Of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. Although it was a slight challenge to read, due to its extensive amount of world-building, I was always enticed and struggled to put the book down. It also is one of the main influences for my new writings. I spent countless hours on YouTube after reading the book watching video essays and analyses. My next steps to improve are to practice more with exploring different styles and integrating moments where tension is released if I am writing serious pieces.

 

Part D

 

Reading the diversity that our class was able to create had me in awe, I always found myself looking through the class blogs at night when I couldn’t sleep and reading works from people I have never spoken to before. (talk about one specific person)

 

All the writers seminars gave me so many new ideas and drafts. I was always excited to emulate from someone I haven’t studied or read from before, and I always learned something new about how to write. The seminars on songwriters were my favourites because I have always been interested in music, and they gave me inspiration for my own music. Since both musicians were rappers, and the style I write my songs in are Hip-Hop, Rap, and R&B, I always found different ways to tell stories through my lyrics. My emulation from the J. Cole seminar was one that I was particularly fond of because I was able to tell a story about a situation I had no experience with. (insert emulation)

 

Roald Dahl is also an artist I was quite interested in because I didn’t know about his darker writings. In the future I am going to read more of his short stories that have dark themes so that I can start exploring the horror genre more.

Part E

The first post I will be critiquing is He Loves Me Not. This was my class act script for Drama 20. My title was inspired by the game of French origin where an individual plucks petals from a daisy to determine whether or not their love interest loves them back.

This play explores the struggle of Violet on whether to stay with or leave her abusive relationship.

My purpose was to display the reality of abusive relationships and give a glimpse into each side of the story. My intended audience was my Drama 20 classmates, as well as other students at the school. My main influence was my own real life experiences of witnessing situations like these. I also got inspiration from one of my peer’s class act scripts.

I tried to make my script stylistic while keeping it grounded in reality. For example, the line “Every month was just a descent deeper into his darkness.” I used alliteration to make that line more poetic, and I tried to keep the meaning behind the line and maintain the purpose.

I got lots of help editing this script from my classmates and my Drama teacher. They constantly gave me new ideas to implement. I also had an epiphany when I began to write my characters more dynamically. Originally my characters followed film stereotypes, but I realized that humans are much more complex, so I tried to make my characters are realistic by adding flaws as well as showing the good in their hearts.

The second piece I will be critiquing is Almost, a poem I wrote last year, and published this year. The title alludes to the use of slant rhyme, because slant rhyme is words that almost rhyme. The title also is the topic that I explore in the poem: the word almost, and how pointless it is.

Almost explores the insignificance of the word almost, and how it evokes a false sense of hope.

My purpose with this poem was to express my feelings on the use of “almost.” My intended audience was for my classmates, so that I could demonstrate why almost is a meaningless word (in most contexts).

My influence for this piece came from the band, Twenty One Pilots, and the writer’s seminar I saw on them.

My style for this piece was to create a harsh sounding lyric type poem, which flowed well and had some abrupt pauses or asides. This can be seen in the line, “Tell someone that something they wanted could’ve been theirs…but it wasn’t.”

I experimented with different types of songwriting and I got feedback from the classmate who presented the writer’s seminar that inspired the piece to make it the best I could.