Artist Statement
At the start of the semester, entering English 416, I felt very nervous and unworthy of being in the class. I was intimidated by great writers who wrote so easily and who I don’t doubt will be published authors someday. This course was my first upper level English class and I felt unqualified as the class felt like a whole different ballgame and I had only been told in high school that I wrote well. At the start of the course my writing lacked an overall point, and my characters had no depth. At the end of the semester, my writing is still not perfect but I can see a positive change in it. The craft element that has improved the most for me personally was the use of showing versus telling. In the very first paper that we read in the …show more content…
One of the things that I enjoyed most was our readings. Incarnations of Burned Children by David Foster Wallace, Lobster Night by Russell Banks, and Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman are three short stories that impacted me the most from these stories. From Incarnations of Burned Children and Binocular Vision I learned that a story does not have to be long at all for it to be meaningful. The use of one single event can create a lot of meaning in a story. The use of sentence length can also shape a story greatly. One of the big things that I leaned from these two short stories was that you must only keep the details that are absolutely essential and necessary in order for the story to succeed. From Lobster Night I took a lot away about when and where you want to place readers in a story. You don’t always have to start from the beginning, you can place the readers right into the action. I think a lot of my writing prior to the class gave readers way too much background information that was completely unnecessary, but through this piece I learned a lot about just how important it is to put the readers in just the right place when they are beginning or ending a
At the start of the semester, entering English 416, I felt very nervous and unworthy of being in the class. I was intimidated by great writers who wrote so easily and who I don’t doubt will be published authors someday. This course was my first upper level English class and I felt unqualified as the class felt like a whole different ballgame and I had only been told in high school that I wrote well. At the start of the course my writing lacked an overall point, and my characters had no depth. At the end of the semester, my writing is still not perfect but I can see a positive change in it. The craft element that has improved the most for me personally was the use of showing versus telling. In the very first paper that we read in the …show more content…
One of the things that I enjoyed most was our readings. Incarnations of Burned Children by David Foster Wallace, Lobster Night by Russell Banks, and Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman are three short stories that impacted me the most from these stories. From Incarnations of Burned Children and Binocular Vision I learned that a story does not have to be long at all for it to be meaningful. The use of one single event can create a lot of meaning in a story. The use of sentence length can also shape a story greatly. One of the big things that I leaned from these two short stories was that you must only keep the details that are absolutely essential and necessary in order for the story to succeed. From Lobster Night I took a lot away about when and where you want to place readers in a story. You don’t always have to start from the beginning, you can place the readers right into the action. I think a lot of my writing prior to the class gave readers way too much background information that was completely unnecessary, but through this piece I learned a lot about just how important it is to put the readers in just the right place when they are beginning or ending a