I learned about myself as a writer is that I had to take inspirations based on life and go with the flow. When I was about to write my first story, I was worried about structure and what should I write about. My early assumptions about myself and writing is that I couldn’t write without discipline. For all my academic life, I learned about how to write, sure writing has rules, but I worried about not creative enough to write my own short story and/or poetry. The thought of doing that made me cringe at myself. By using some of my own life experiences, it allowed me to write the short stories and poems. As the months progressed, I realized that my worries about my creative writing being perfect got in the way of my writing. My experience revising assignments were helpful to me. Saba’s feedback on my poems stood out to me. Saba’s critique on my two of my poems helped make my poems better. For “Life”, I inserted another stanza relating for the past year and a half everybody has been facing. For “Dishes” I added a little bit of flair to improve my poem. For “Walking”, my poem was not complete, so I put an ending for it.
I learned about myself as a reader that not everything has to be nonfiction and fictional writing can be inspired by real life. When I read about Le Guin’s story, I thought it was supposed to be a regular fictional story, but I never knew that it would get all supernatural and weird. It’s been a while since I read a regular fictional story for school, I only listened to fictional audiobooks on Libby for enjoyment and the last time I read fictional stories was back during late 2019, during in-person classes. Coates uses experiences of slavery that inspired him to intertwine his novel, The Water Dancer. The challenges of adapting to an online writing class, was falling asleep. On Monday nights, I get less sleep and must wake up early in the morning to do some homework. I had to take a nap before class. Besides that, I didn’t have so much trouble adapting to an online world when it came to writing. It was mostly less or more of the same pre-covid, but this time all my assignments were uploaded on Blackboard and Open lab.
I will be able to use what I have learned this semester and transfer that knowledge in college or outside my it by going with the flow and using real-life inspirations. When I was about to write my poems, I found a guide to writing poems and using literary devices to help me out from high school days. As I was writing the four poems, I decided to not use the handout so much and just chill and go with the flow. Over the past year, I learned how to relax and take breaks from academic work and be less stressful about it. So, I applied that self-care method when I was writing my poems. My favorite assignment was Memoir 2 because it gave me the chance to write about a very memorable moment from this past summer, along with a very valuable lesson, to never take travel for granted again. I decided to use a little bit of Journal 2 and my summer vacation to Hershey Park to write my memoir. A notable lesson that stuck with me is to not hold myself back from creative writing and let go of any worries and self-doubt. Also, to use real-life events for inspiration when doing creative writing.
First, I love the organization you developed in this final reflection. Everything from this reflection shows moments in detail where writing has taken a toll on you, which I can also relate to.
One thing the writer learned about themselves is to take their time with their work. This goes to show the effort put in for stories, memoirs, poems, and so on. I would also take my time whenever I am writing something that needs to be perfect.
For reading, the writer has learned that fiction writing can be inspired by real-life events based on the books they read.
The writer will now utilize the skills they built from the beginning to the future of writing. For example, the writer mentions the use of literary devices helping them build up their writing.
Overall, great final reflection, I see a few grammar mistakes here and there but besides that, I think you illustrate good points of what it’s like to be a writer yourself, and the things you learned/dealt with.