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.