Artistic Statement

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MAJOR WRITING PROJECT 4: THE ARTISTIC STATEMENT (50 POINTS)

CREATIVE WRITING

DIRECTIONS

Develop a short essay broken into four sections that shows how your point of view/approach to creative writing evolved this semester (200-300 words per section; at least 800 words total):

Each section (4x) should provide a snapshot/glimpse into your point of view at that juncture in the semester (note: a specific snapshot/anecdote, not a summary of everything).

- First Section: Evolution from Start of Class to End of Poetry Project

- Second Section: Evolution from Poetry to Nonfiction

- Third Section: Evolution from Nonfiction to Fiction

- Fourth Section: Lasting Impression/Lingering Image from the Semester

Each section should stand on its own as one “vignette” (a brief, descriptive “episode,” kind of like a series of prose poems) but also work together with the other sections to show the subtle shifts in your experiences and approach to writing from project to project (as if you were flipping through a photo album of the semester).

We do not need an intro, conclusion, or even transitions from section to section; your sections should read as a series of photographs for your audience to compare and draw conclusions for themselves.

The first three (3) sections should include specific examples from one of the pieces you wrote for the corresponding project (just one piece, not both):

In the fourth section, you should choose one piece of your writing that you are proudest of or that illustrates how much you have grown throughout the semester.

The point of these sections (and essay overall) is not to show how perfect you were in each project.

It is to show how you have learned and applied the concepts throughout the semester and how you have grown as a writer.

Each section (4x) should include an epigraph from something that we have read/discussed this semester:

Each section should start with a short quote that somehow represents your approach to writing the in the corresponding genre as you look back on it.

You should have at least one epigraph taken from the poetry unit, one from the creative nonfiction unit, and one from the fiction/drama unit.

For the fourth section, you can choose any quote from throughout the semester that was the most important to you or best captures your growth throughout the semester.

Note that you can use any of the quotes that you wrote about for your reflection questions on each project.

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Your epigraph can be a particular line from our class readings that represents a theme/idea that you identified with or that made you rethink the way you view poetry, nonfiction, fiction, or creative writing in general:

I want people to read my work and notice my attention to language, or the way I’ve balanced elements of scene with my reflection on page four, or the actually difficult questions I’m grappling with on the page—the hard questions, the ones I want to back away from but force myself to answer.

- Silas Hansen “On Asking the Hard Questions”

You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: 'No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.' And in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too."

- George Saunders ("What Writers Really Do")

"Strip it to the barest bones. Cut everything."

- Tom Chiarella (“Compressing Dialogue”)

And/or it can be a specific line from one of the pieces that we read for class that you used as a model and/or inspiration for your own writing:

Be suspicious of any word you learned / and were proud of learning. / It will go bad. / It will fall off the page.

- Miller Williams “Let Me Tell You”

“After my childhood, after all that long terrible struggle to simply survive, to escape my stepfather, uncles, speeding Pontiacs, broken glass, and rotten floorboards, or that inevitable death by misadventure that claimed so many of my cousins… I had imagined the hunger for life in me insatiable, endless, and unshakable.”

- Dorothy Allison “Deciding to Live”

First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably.

- Lorrie Moore “How to Become a Writer”

The epigraphs and sections you include do not have to be “life-changing”:

Just choose four different quotes/lines that stuck out to you and/or stuck with you as wrote your projects (i.e. things that you highlighted, wrote down in your notes, or just remembered for some reason, even if that reason was that you struggled to understand it at the time).

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Don’t overthink this:

Go back through your homework and reflection questions from each unit (if you highlighted it, annotated it, copied it down, then it meant something to you at the time--there was something about it that seemed important, even if you didn’t fully understand until now, even if you don’t fully understand it now)

If you are still stuck, just write about four different ideas/themes/strategies/activities that made you think about writing in some slightly new/different way (i.e. light-bulb moments or aha moments or moments of confusion/frustration/struggle).