Writing fiction allows the writer to be creative. You can chose your own characters, their story, the context, setting, scene, everything. As long as it makes sense. What is difficult about making it work is making it interesting. You need to write to engage your audience. Also you need to think of your own symbolism, and your own thematic elements. What do you what your reader to take from this experience? There is a ton of thought that goes in to writing a story and it can be very frustrating for the reader.
Writing about fiction can be just as frustrating. Having to go in to the context, background, and theme can sometimes be difficult. In writing about “A Hand in the Grave” I found it hard to find outside sources to back up the ideas that I had when interpreting the story.
Also, in writing about fiction there is the problem about the “right” interpretation. Yes, a story is open to interpretation, but there are so many issues with that as well. If you are writing about your own interpretation, or ideas regarding a piece of fiction, there has to be sufficient evidence to back it up.
I liked going into the story and re-reading it. Honestly, every time I read it I learned something new. I had written my entire essay, when I realized at the end they did not even need the body. After reading that it completely changed my perception of the characters and interpretation of the story. It was exciting for me to go back and try to find the clues that lead up to it, and trying to a put a new spin on things.
So peeling the onion can sometimes be fun. Or sometimes it can make you cry.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
I completely agree that while anyone can write a story, an engaging and insightful story is much more difficult to come by. Students need the tools and techniques of writing that can only really be learned by reading and analyzing texts. I think that the more a teacher is able to show students how and why a text works, the students will have a competitive edge for when they write their own stories. Students who are blindly told to write a short story will probably feel overwhelmed because there is so much to write about. I think that the prompts that we used in this class would be great in helping students get their ideas out. Writing about fiction is more difficult to me just because it is so open ended and open to interpretation. While I do know how to analyze a text, there are so many theories to use and it’s a bit overwhelming when trying to narrow everything down for the essay.
I think its really true when you talked about the right or wrong interpretation. Stories are indeed open to interpretation but there is a lot of focus in the academic field about right and wrong. I thinks it's ridiculous. Academics are so quick to judge value and dismiss ideas and this makes it an intimidating place for people to come in and voice their own opinions and ideas. There is always the fear of having that dreaded wrong interpretation. It really doesn't make for an open-minded type of forum when that is precisely what it is supposed to be.
Perhaps that is why the onion makes you cry.
You talk about finding the "right" interpretation of a story. The fact of the matter is that any interpretation of a story that you can justify is a valid interpretation.
I just read an Umberto Eco essay that discussed the idea of what you can and can't use when interpreting a story. Basically, the idea was that you can't use unintentional mistakes in a story as the baseline for defining that story. I have a problem with that - I think mistakes can come from the author's worldview, and studying those mistakes can tell us a lot about the world the story is mirron (or
Stupid "no editing comments" blogger.
...and studying those mistakes can tell us a lot about the world the story is mirroring (are trying to avoid).
Okay so... I guess I agree with what you are saying about literature. And I know for a fact because of past experiences that people can really get very wrong readings of fiction. So, I do totally agree with you that when writing about literature it can be a pain in the butt trying to find sources and quotes to support your essay. This being said I think while it is super annoying it can also be beneficial. How you are asking yourself now (yes that is right through my computer I can see you asking yourself this) Just like you said; in second readings new and often more interesting things emerge from a text when read again, and finding those quotes forces students to do that second reading.
I am in complete agreement with you on the paper we wrote about another author's work. It is sometimes very frustrating when trying to find secondary sources to support the story we are analyzing. That was one of the factors that influenced my story choice. I looked for articles on it before I started writing. However, this impacted my paper because I relied to much on those sources, and not on my own thoughts. I also worry about my interpretation. Is it anywhere close to what the author intended? That was one of the nice things about the fiction assignment. Writing my own story allowed me to have the freedom to write anything I wanted to write about. It surprised me when I finished my story. I never thought it would end like it did. Hopefully we can all incorporate creative writing in our classrooms.
Post a Comment