Genres/Forms

I’ve always written mostly in the fiction genre.  While I have enjoyed writing some essays, fiction is what I write for fun.  I’ve made up mental stories since I was a child, so writing them down just seemed like the natural progression.  Early on, a lot of the fiction I wrote was similar to what I was reading at the time; I would write mysteries after reading The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew. But I eventually realized this and tried to make my fiction at least a little more original.  I still draw upon what I’m reading a little, though.  I read mostly Young Adult books and that is the genre that I find myself writing the most.  But I no longer write in the more specific genre of the book I’m reading-mystery, romance, fantasy, etc.  I’ve finally even stopped myself from feeling the need to write some type of romance, since the majority of the books I read as a child were romance. I think that seeing the same ideas coming out over and over again in so many books, typical clichés of certain genres, have helped me to learn to avoid these.    It’s made me try my hardest to write something different.  I love writing fantasy or just “slice-of-life” stories.  But I try to write them differently than the thousands of stories I’ve read of the same genre.

While I do usually stick to fiction writing, I also enjoy writing poetry.  Unlike fiction though, I really don’t like to read poetry very much.  My poetry is also not usually meant for anyone to ever see.  It’s usually angsty and horribly written because I just use it to release emotions or to express myself.  In class it was said that my story was light hearted and totally free of angst.  That’s probably because I try to put all darkness into my poems and keep my stories relatively light. However, I do have many poems that aren’t dark at all. If I just see something interesting that I want to express in words, I may turn it into poetry. It’s still just a way of expressing myself. 

Creative nonfiction is another genre that I have recently begun to enjoy writing. I’ve only written one creative nonfiction piece, but I really liked writing it.  I liked how it was nonfiction, but with a slight hint of fiction since while the events definitely happened; I had to be a little bit creative with the dialogue since I don’t remember exactly what was said when I was eight.  That’s probably why I enjoyed writing it so much.  All my fiction stories have elements of truth in them.  I like to take real events and then twist them to make them fiction.  So it was somewhat similar to doing this, except not going so far that it actually becomes fiction. It’s just another form of telling a story to me. Except with CNF, the story is true. 

My Style- Past, Present, and Future

As far back as I can remember, long before I could actually write stories, I was already making them up in my mind.  Of course, back then those stories involved twin puppies and princesses finding their prince.  Even when I became able to actually write stories, most of the time they were very cliché.  They always seemed to have the same kind of characters and plot as a million other stories. I had major problems with originality.  In high school, I tried to solve this by writing way outside the box.  This is funny because the story that started this idea was actually about a box.  It was a crazy story and definitely different than anything I had ever read before.  But it was nowhere near mature.  If someone just wanted a laugh they could possibly enjoy it, but that was all it was good for.  There were no deeper meanings or multi-layers.  It was just a very shallow story.  And that’s not the kind of writing that I wanted to be known for.  But this experience did teach me one thing-I can avoid clichés if I have some kind of inspiration to write from (my box story was inspired by the Boxer Rebellion). If I just pull a story from nowhere, I write clichés, but if I draw from experiences or objects that I want to give stories to, I can avoid clichés a little bit more.  So when I took my first creative writing classes at Mount, I always made sure to get my ideas from somewhere.  Kriuq from Tascone’s class was based off the cover picture of our text book.  My final play in Writing Drama was based off of past experiences.  And I consider both to be very original.  I still like to be funny.  But I try to put more than just humor in my stories now. The excerpt that I brought into class was part of a much longer story, a murder mystery, in fact. So it definitely wasn’t all “fun and games.” But I don’t like making my stories too dark either. I reserve the angst for my poetry.  I try to use humor to make my stories lighter. I also want my stories to have deeper meanings. After studying Diana Wynne Jones, I know that I don’t compare to her stories’ complexity at all, but I do at least make an effort to make my stories more complex now.   I’m also still trying to avoid stereotypes and clichés so I tend to make my characters different but still somewhat realistic. 

On the other hand, much of writing style hasn’t changed. I’ve always used a decent amount of detail.  I think it’s just been drilled into my head so much since the beginning of everything that I almost have to be descriptive.  I also have always written with about an equal amount of exposition and dialogue.  I have always hated books that had too much of one or the other so I always try to avoid it as much as possible.  I also almost always write in third person.  I just feel most comfortable writing in third person. I did attempt to write a story in first person in Tascone’s class.  I wanted to do something completely different than my usual stories, so I wrote it in first person with a young boy as the main character.  I have a tendency to write female main characters, so this was definitely a challenge for me.  It came out ok, but it still had a bit of a cliché feel to it.  Hopefully, I will reach a point where I can write differently from my norm, but still be able to avoid the “cliché” area.  

Author Sounds Like

           Finding words to describe what Diana Wynne Jones’ writing sounds like was and still is difficult.  Thinking about it originally, all I could think about was ‘magical’.  But this could describe many fantasy novels.  But there is one word that I have always thought of when I think of Jones’ writing, and that is ‘colorful’.  In fact, way back at the beginning of this project, when we had to bring in excerpts from two authors, ‘colorful’ is the word I used to describe Jones’ style. 

            By ‘colorful’ I don’t just mean that she uses a lot of ‘color’ words, which she does, but I really mean that her books are always vivid and picturesque.  Her style of writing paints a picture in the reader’s mind of everything they’re reading because everything is colorful.  The dialogues, the characters, even the plots themselves are colorful.  And Jones doesn’t do this just by describing things.  She doesn’t just say, “He had blonde hair and blue eyes.”  In fact, some of her characters’ physical attributes are barely described.  Instead, she uses the characters’ dialogue and actions to bring out their ‘color’ while making the settings very descriptive and literally “colorful.”  In this way, scenes are vividly painted in the reader’s mind.

            For example, this is an excerpt from Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle:

The rest of the castle had to be beyond one or other of the four low black doors around the room. Sophie opened the nearest, in the end wall beyond the bench.  There was a large bathroom beyond it. In some ways it was a bathroom you might normally find only in a palace, full of luxuries such as an indoor toilet, a shower stall, an immense bath with clawed feet, and mirrors on every wall. But it was even dirtier than the other room. Sophie winced from the toilet, flinched at the color of the bath, recoiled from green weed growing in the shower, and quite easily avoided looking at her shriveled shape in the mirrors because the glass was plastered with blobs and runnels of nameless substances. The nameless substances themselves were crowded onto a very large shelf over the bath. They were in jars, boxes, tubes, and hundreds of tattered brown packets and paper bags. The biggest jar had a name. It was called Drying Power in crooked letters.  Sophie was not sure whether there should be a D in that or not.  She picked up a packet at random. It had SKIN scrawled on it, and she put it back hurriedly.  Another jar said EYES in the same scrawl.  A tube stated FOR DECAY.  “It seems to work too,” Sophie murmured, looking into the washbasin with a shiver.

In this, there are clear examples of actual color-black doors and green weed. And there is quite a lot of description used to paint the image of the setting too.  But the only description for Sophie is “shriveled.” Yet, the reader can still get a clear image of her as she winces, flinches, recoils, and avoids because these actions are just so easy to see in one’s mind.  And they tell the reader something about Sophie’s character as well.  Plus, there may be only one line of dialogue, but it only adds to the image of Sophie that the reader is formulating.  It makes it all very vivid and definitely colorful.  

Presentation #2

Good:
Still seemed to know info
Got better with note cards towards end
Clear beginning, middle, end
Transitions

Bad:
Still hate my voice
Did worse with note cards this time
Wasn't as practiced
Need more eye contact

Author's Influences

Diana Wynne Jones wasn’t allowed to read many books as a child. Her father was a teacher, but he just didn’t want to buy books for his children. So it wasn’t until adulthood that Jones started to read enough to be influenced by other writers.  And when this time came, several authors were memorable enough to influence her.

            Jones admitted to being influenced by authors like E. Nesbit, George Meredith, and Joan Aiken. She even confessed that she admired Chaucer’s definition of a hero and applied it to her own works.  But the two most prominent influences in Jones’ writing were C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.  Both were lecturers at her university, so she was able to be directly taught by them.

            Apparently, while C.S. Lewis was a great lecturer, Tolkien just wanted to finish writing The Lord of the Rings so he tried to scare away his students with really bad lecturing.  Jones, however, stuck around and was fascinated by his words. Jones’ sentence structure resembles both Lewis’s and Tolkien’s (although it’s closer to Lewis’s) and she admitted to having gotten the idea of writing about new worlds from both authors.  Tolkien, however, was the author who provided the most inspiration to her. He showed her that it was acceptable to write fantasy. She also listened, fascinated, by his lectures about taking a basic plot and turning it into something more.  This technique is clearly shown in the majority of her writing.

            So while Jones may not have been fortunate enough to read much as a child, she made up for it as an adult. She was given the amazing opportunity to be directly influenced by two of the greatest fantasy writers of the time. Such a strong background only increased the chances of her own writing becoming great.  

Presentation #1

Good: 
-Audience inclusive intro
-Clear beginning and end
-Knew info pretty well
-Didn't move around too much
-No ums!

Bad:
-I hate my voice (too bad I can't change this!)
-Used my note cards a bit too much
-Stuttered a few times
-Messed up with slides, should have fixed it w/o vocalizing
-Seemed to pause too long a few times

Author's Audience

Determining the audience of Diana Wynne Jones’ books was more difficult than it appeared. As I stated during our previous presentations, her books are read by both adults and children. She also specifically writes some books for children, some books for young adults, and some for adults. But even her so-called adult books are listed in the juvenile section of the library. And to add to this huge contradiction, the books themselves have complex plots and characters that just seem to be written for an older audience. Based on this mixed up information, I had to determine the intended audience of her books.

            Luckily, Jones, herself, answers this question always writing complex plots. In an interview, she stated that children don’t have a problem with complexity because they’re used to not knowing things. Adults, on the other hand, need simpler storylines.  So since all her stories are complex, we can safely assume that she’s writing for children.

            Her thoughtfulness in this complexity that she writes into her novels forms a unique relationship between her and her readers. She wants children to think about what they’re reading and analyze its meaning.  In fact, in a text analyzing Diana’s writing, Farah Mendlesohn even suggests that Diana wants her readers to become critical readers, taking reading to a new level for children. Not only that, but Diana has said herself that she wants her readers to learn something while reading her books. She even said she started writing children’s books because, “There were no books with real people in, with humor in, that told children what they need to know without preaching at them. So she set out to write these inconspicuously educational books.

            In her quest, she gained a large following of child readers, who probably never even realized that they were learning something while reading. Instead, they were just drawn in by the fantastical worlds written by Diana. Her readers continue their side of the relationship by continuing to read her books-even into adulthood. They also sometimes go even further than this and are always quick to defend her writing in any circumstance.

            For example, for some reason, Harry Potter is constantly compared to Diana’s books.  But her older readers are always quick to point out that Diana has been around much longer than J.K. Rowling.  However, Diana just accepted her readers’ support but didn’t seem to care much about the issue. She was probably just glad that someone else was managing to draw children into the wonderful world of reading.

            To back to what I said earlier, while connecting with her intended child audience, Diana’s books are also unexpectedly enjoyed by adults.  These unintended readers are brought in by the very complexity that Diana thought adults wouldn’t like. Her stories aren’t dumbed down for children, so adults can still appreciate them. Thus, Diana Wynne Jones’ audience ends up including both children and adults, intended and unintended. 

Author/Audience Relationship

Amanda Baggs’ writing definitely feels different than a lot of writer’s works. She is very blunt and straight-forward in her thoughts. She wants to share the honest truth with her readers. She also just wants to get her point across, so she does. She doesn't spend time trying to connect with her audience and make them like her. In fact, in many of her entries, she treats all of the audience as the same, as the people who she's angry with.  But she doesn't care about how her audience feels, she just wants to state her point and get her feelings across.  

In both the video and her blog, she comes across as confrontational towards the audience.  I think she does this because she feels that it is the only way people will listen to her and the only way that she will be able to get her point across.  If she just states things meekly, people won’t listen because the words are coming from “just an autistic person”.  However, by being confrontational towards her audience, she’s letting people know that she’s a human being too and she has feelings about these things just like any other person.  The confrontational tone also just stands out and catches the reader’s attention. Whether it makes the reader feel mad, confused, or sympathetic, it still makes the reader notice and feel something about her writing.  

Author Proposal

When this project was originally explained to us, I immediately thought of working with Diana Wynne Jones.  I would not say that she’s my favorite author, but I do really like her style.  As a fantasy writer, she does an excellent job of drawing her readers into the mystical worlds she creates. 

What’s interesting about DWJ is that while most of her books can be found in the Young Adult section, not all of her readers are young adults.  Her books attract even older adults and younger children to their pages.  Of course, DWJ does have a few books that are not classified as ‘Young Adult.’ However, her so-called “Children’s” books are still enjoyed by adults and vice versa.

So my main focus for this project is this: what is it about Diana Wynne Jones’ style or voice that makes her books popular with such a wide range of ages?  Most authors write to a particular age group and stick with that age. But there’s just something about DWJ’s writing that allows her to appeal to a much wider audience.

While trying to answer this question, I’m going to look into it two separate ways. I plan to read examples of her adult, young adult, and children’s books and try to see if her voice changes when writing for different genres.  I also plan to examine her specific style of writing in order to identify the techniques she uses to transcend audiences.  This will include looking at such aspects like her sentence structure and the persona she uses while writing.

I plan to also read similar genre books by other authors that may have a more specific age group as an audience.  Hopefully, this will give me an idea as to what DWJ does differently in her books to appeal to a more age-varied audience.

Finally, DWJ often shared her thoughts on her writing style.  I’m going to try to find any interviews she may have given about why she chooses the genres she does.  What did she think about publishing books in multiple genres?  Did she purposely write to appeal to a wider age range? And if so, how did she think she went about it? What did she think her techniques were?  I don’t know if she ever answered these questions (she died last year, unfortunately) but I plan to try to find her thoughts on this topic.

Chaos VS Simplicity VS Femininity

Upon visiting the Pepsi, IKEA, and Dove websites, I had one definite conclusion: all three sites are extremely different. They each obviously have very different audiences that they are trying to reach.  Whether their attempts are successful, I don’t know.

The first site I opened was the Pepsi one. My first thought? Ooohhh, pretty colors. Followed by: what the heck is going on here?  Pepsi’s home page is a covered in different, brightly colored boxes.  It’s all crammed together and feels very chaotic. Just looking at the home page alone, I have to wonder, does this marketing strategy actually work?  While there are various Pepsi logos spread across the page, most of the page is taken up with the colored boxes with Tweets about X-Factor. Someone searching for information about the product itself has to go digging deeper into the site.  The bright colors and use of popular media indicates that the intended audience is for teenagers through young adults, but would these people be interested in the product behind X-Factor? Because it seems to me, this site is promoting X-Factor more than trying to sell Pepsi. I’m sure there’s some kind of brilliant marketing strategy behind this. Maybe the “You like this? We like that too!” strategy.

I visited the IKEA site next. It has a totally different feeling than Pepsi.  My first thought was that it looked a lot like the set up of Amazon or EBay. It actually seems to be trying to sell products, rather than just promote itself through popular media.  With the bright but still plain colors, I’m guessing the intended audience is older than Pepsi’s.  It’s not too old though, since some of the products on the home page appeal to me.  I noticed that on the big picture of various products, there are some fun patterns on pillows and lampshades.  This suggests that while the intended audience is older than teenagers, college students and other young adults may still be included.  The fonts and layouts are also very simplistic and much easier to follow than the pure chaos of the Pepsi page.

Finally, I checked out the Dove page, which feels like the middle ground between Pepsi and IKEA. Like IKEA, Dove also shows some of their products on the home page. However, the site also seems less product based like the Pepsi site.  For example, there are sections for tips, videos, and games.  While Pepsi and IKEA’s intended audience was for any gender, Dove is clearly geared towards women.  The whites and simple colors of the site (plus the large picture of a woman) only emphasize this fact.  They do have some products for men but the advertisement still says ‘your football fan.’  Dove is also very simplistic compared to the busy-ness of the Pepsi site.  

Hemingway Takes on a Blog

My first thought after reading both A Clean, Well-Lighted Place and the Smitten Kitchen blog was that the difference in time periods was very obvious.  Other than the very modern “canvas” of the Smitten Kitchen blog, the style just has a much more modern feel than Hemingway’s story.   One thing that really stuck out to me (and probably due to our recent reading) was the use of commas, parentheses and other punctuation. The blog uses these throughout the entire thing. It gives it that modern feel while also making it very light and conversational.  While the sentences were shorter and more broken up with punctuation, it made it extremely easy to read. I could hear the author speaking to me rather than just writing.

Hemingway is the complete opposite of the Smitten Kitchen blog.  While the content seems very simple, it’s still written in a much “heavier” way than the blog.  Unlike the author of the blog, Hemingway doesn't use a lot of punctuation. It’s not grammatically incorrect like some works by “big foot stylists”; Hemingway still uses commas. However, he doesn’t use them in the conversational way that the blog did.  Some sentences just feel long and draggy. The language itself has a slower feeling to it than the language used in the blog. The entire piece definitely feels much older and less colorful than the Smitten Kitchen blog.  Even so, this simplistic way of writing seems to work well for the piece.

Lovecraft the Man = Lovecraft the Voice?

As this was my first time reading a work by Lovecraft, it was difficult for me to determine whether Lovecraft the man was the same as Lovecraft the voice. Maybe if I had a time machine, I would know a definite answer to this question.  But since I’m a Writing major for a reason and am horrible at math and science, building a time machine is out of the question. However, I do believe that at the very least, Lovecraft didn’t use an “imposter voice”.    Thaisa and Wall state that imposter voices “can’t stand up to the demands of the creative imagination that needs a wide, open sky.”  Lovecraft’s imagination was clearly not restricted in The Madness from the Sea. The story had to require a lot of imagination. Of course, Lovecraft himself probably never experienced such a phenomenon as the one he wrote about, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t put his own unique viewpoint into the situation.  While he may never have seen or been frightened by a Cthulhu, he may have experienced a similar terror at something else. This past experience could then contribute to his own unique voice on the subject of fear. This seems to point towards Thaisa and Wall’s theory of one’s true voice coming from the heart since he probably had to use his feelings from this experience to give an accurate portrayal of the fear the narrator felt.  So while Lovecraft the man may be totally different from his narrator, I think there is enough evidence to say that the man is at the very least similar to the voice through the use of his own feelings from different experiences.  If nothing else, one can look at how popular Lovecraft‘s works remain today, decades after his death. If he was truly using an imposter voice, his stories would not have remained so popular.