Writing about writing...

For those of my followers, (maybe they are imaginary?) who are reading this out of context, I am now going to write and reflect about my writing.

Writing about food seems fairly easy. Finding the right language to use in order to provoke the same feelings in someone else that I experienced myself was incredibly challenging. Writing for this class really illustrated for me the power of words and using effective language to provoke mutual connotations and feelings surrounding food. Everybody eats, and values their eating experience very individually, but through all of our writing assignments I began to value more importantly the power of communication and unification through food, and to be consciously growing my capabilities of articulating my experiences with food. It was striking to me how plain this seemed in our readings. There were many sentences that made me want to jump up and down because I felt such a connection with a moment or scene in a story because of word choice. Setting out on our writing assignments, I wanted to create those moments for my readers.

Transporting someone else through food is challenging, especially when it is through our own personal experiences. The authors we read were admirably well-versed and polished in their communication of such universal feelings surrounding food. I often feel as though food is such an internal experience, it is difficult to reproduce that for someone else as something that will be mutually meaningful. Reading the works of others helped to infuse these skills and understand the potential for my writing. However, it was surprisingly hard to find just the right word or phrase, and many times it took more than one try… coming back to the piece after taking a long break. But other times in the moment, the language just came to me. Most of the time it was born from saying something out loud that sounded right or got a positive reaction from someone else. My primary struggle was definitely finding the right words to use.

After I had patched together what seemed to be some language we could work with as a class, I was always struck with how much my organization needed rethinking after a workshop. As with many drafts for my other classes I felt as though during the first draft I was able to get down raw ideas that would build the framework for my final draft. Playing with structure and organization was FUN! Again, I really felt like I had a lot of power to be really careful about how I conveyed what I was talking about to the reader… deciding how to open or close a piece, and deciding if certain parts should go together. I felt that the organization of my pieces set a rhythm and cadence to the flow that translated into the pace and climax of the concepts for the reader, and these qualities enhance the ideas as they are presented. This segment was an important part of my revisions.

Finally I am infinitely more comfortable using a journalistic style: short paragraphs, fluid changes in subject or idea throughout a piece, and finding my identity or voice within a piece. Through our three forms, memoir, personal essay and criticism and laboring over each, I realize how much of a process my writing became. Though process seemed overwhelming, by the end of the quarter I saw it as an opportunity to improve… even if only by a few words with each read through, every time I looked at a piece again I would get a new idea or gain insight from a new angle. There were many things the words said about one another when they were in close proximity, shedding light on unexpected angles of my experiences. In a way I don’t think I could ever really feel like a piece was perfect, but I felt as though some of them came pretty close.