Need to write self reflection about what I have wrote during the semester!

Sample Genre Reflection

Janine R.

Fiction proved difficult for me. I am used to writing in a journal, I’m used to writing from life. I found it frightening to make things up. All my school life, I’ve been rewarded for NOT making things up—in that way, dragons live! I was mystified by how fiction writers do this. It was an amazing leap from the here and now of life to the there and then of some imaginary person’s life.

In the first class that we had to bring a prompt for a peer to use to write a piece of flash fiction, my prompts were boring. They were based on my own life. “A college-aged girl almost fails a test.” Two of three were left on the table. No one wanted to write about their own lives or the ordinariness of life. I get that. I felt awkward shuffling through slips of paper and finally just grabbed two. Then I sat there. It was almost like I had been asked to write something in a foreign language. I had “A bomber places an explosive device near a florist’s shop” and “An old woman shops for a new washing machine with a young salesman.” A plot and a character.

I picked the bomber. This was because I had seen lots of television shows and movies where bombs were detonated. The first version was short and to the point. The building blew up. A worker was killed, people were horrified. End of story. There was no plot—there was no tension, no one was central to this, and there was no climax. I didn’t get that to have a climax, I needed to have change beyond what might happen physically when a bomb explodes. Someone had to care, someone had to change. Even with a flash fiction, I had room to expand, however, and a peer very kindly asked me a lot of questions: who placed the bomb—does it matter? Who is in the shop? Why are they there? What will happen to their lives and the lives of their loved ones? How will this reshape the community—where IS this shop? Could this be a metaphor for something else?

What you’ll read in a moment is the fourth version of that story. Over the course of three weeks, I rewrote it twice. I rewrote it again after the poetry unit, because I now cared more about imagery. And I wrote it again after the CNF unit because someone had to do an extra critique and now I could apply what I’d learned about non-fiction.

Now there is a shopkeeper with a name and a family. There is a young woman shopping for flowers for her wedding and an older man shopping for flowers for his wife for their anniversary. It is a middling-sized city, a place where people feel safe: terrorism will never strike them here. The shop becomes a metaphor for a meeting place, for hope and the future. Why? People buy flowers because they are physically real, they are created over time, and they represent something: love, loss, hope. We continue this ritual and tradition because of a culture of hope. In the first two versions, I had the bomb explode immediately. In this final version, it occurs near the end. This permits me to include dialogue, more description of the setting, and to increase the tension. It’s a short-short: something will happen, thinks the reader. And when it does, it is a surprise. I used what I learned from CNF to do some research on bombs (I hope the FBI isn’t monitoring my computer searching!) and the effects of explosions. That makes this more real, moves it from fiction so that it will have a greater effect. Now there are dead people and a shower of flowers and petals coming from everywhere, it seems, covering the sidewalk and the bodies and parts. And in the end, there is a memorial of flowers. In the first versions, the bomb was central; in the last, flowers are.

These changes demonstrate an increasing comfort on my part with creating something from, well, not nothing but not fully something real. I created composite characters based on people I know, have heard or overheard, people I’ve been told about but never met. I was able to finally visualize where this took place. I followed Ann Lamott’s advice and walked myself in my head through this store. I imagined the kinds of flowers that would be on display and what colors would then be all over everything at the end. I included specific names of flowers to help ground the reader. I used characters that were somewhat stereotyped so that we could move through the plot, but they were sufficiently individualized to make readers feel like they “knew them” and that they were “unique.” While the explosion is a huge event, it is not the climax. It stimulates a character to change, to make a decision that will alter them. Here, I did try to imagine how I would respond and why, and then think about who my survivor was and why she might respond differently. I let her do that—gave up some control.

I also spent time in the final revision playing with the sound and the sentence structure. The first few versions sounded more like a criminal activity report: sort of staccato and toneless. As I included dialogue, that loosened up my sense of some kind of strict vocabulary. I set a goal to put in imagery and to listen to the rhythm of sentences, paragraph by paragraph, in keeping with what Starkey has to say about sound in the CNF and poetry. I imagined reading aloud. If you look at the paragraph that described the explosion, I tried to use harsh sounds: lots of plosives and K/P/T/R sounds. In the paragraph about the memorial growing out front, I used softer sounds, assonance instead of consonance.

I’m still dissatisfied with the title. I chose “Peony” because the flower itself is loose and shaggy and looks like a firework. But I’m not sure that this really gets across what I wanted. Titles still frustrate me. I might do some research on the “meanings” we give to certain flowers, or maybe something about flower biology.

While I’ve focused on this story for my genre reflection because it’s had the greatest transformation, I want to point out a few things about the second story, “Mary Moppet.” It has received supportive feedback, but I believe now that it is really meant to be a piece of longer fiction—20-25 pages. I worked from a prompt, but this sort of took off on its own. I’m a fan of horror films, especially bad ones. And, of course, dolls have to be in many of those films! But what if you are a doll and don’t want to be seen that way (the way legitimate clowns don’t want to be seen as insane axe murderers)? I thought about the frightening animism in many Japanese films and novels and began to animate a doll that was being used as a scary object by teenagers as part of their “scare the crap out of others” fun. How could a good doll turn bad—or could a bad doll turn good? I think there are some bigger themes in this I need to develop in more space. Right now, this has some pop and snap to it, and readers think it is fun. But I think there’s a reason Stephen King has long novels. Fun can become terror over time, with slowly rising tension, and with a slow dawning on the part of readers that what they think they know, they do, but only partly. There has to be peaks of surprise and fear until what you feared most is true. I guess what I’m getting at is that I have learned that the genre of fiction chosen and the sub-genre have to work together. I love some of the images I have here (for example, when the teens are far more frightening in their expressions on page two than the doll) and some of the dialogue as it contrasts to the internal monologue of Mary Moppet. Who is more evil? You think you know someone…

Together, these two pieces show not only growth in what I feel I can tackle but also the application of techniques and ideas from other genres. I have placed them last in the portfolio because, although we did fiction first, these demonstrate through revision what happens when it all begins to come together.