Saturday, December 24, 2016

Great googly moogly...and a new direction.

Great googly moogly. 2011. That's the last time I posted anything here. Holy cow. Well, ravelry.com took over a lot of the original function, i.e. storing details about knitting projects. I'd like to move this over to more of a repository for creative writing.

 Back in junior high, I thought I wanted to be a writer, but by the end of high school, my interests had shifted to teaching. Looking back, I so wish I had taken more creative writing classes at Ball State. I did get my degree in teaching and taught for three years--almost five if you count the year subbing at North Newton and the 6 months subbing at Brownsburg, Plainfield, Avon, and Mooresville after moving to Hendricks County. If I ever went back to school, it would be to study creative writing. I have lacked confidence that I really had anything original to write about and didn't want everything I produced to be derivative, but when I consider so much of the writing that gets published, I see very little that is truly original. I think to some extent it all consists of basic stories and themes that are just recycled through different viewpoints. So maybe I should try my own.

 My junior year of high school, the English teacher did a unit on creative writing--poetry, short stories, descriptions, character development. At the end of the year, we were presented with a book of selections of our class's writings. This was preserved in the bulging scrapbook my mother compiled for me and presented at my graduation open house. I came across it several years ago and enjoyed the story I had contributed. I thought it made a good outline for the first chapter or so of a novel. I have considered expanding it since then, and I think I will place those attempts here. Maybe someday they will grow into something more. I had thought I would transcribe it here as is, but I see how thin on details it is. I will see how I can improve it, little by little.

I finished reading through the entire book of selections, and I have to say, we were pretty awesome. It's so interesting to look back and recognize how bright we all were. Sometimes I feel I am not nearly as smart as I used to be. Perhaps everyone feels that way as we gain the wisdom of age and look back on the cleverness of our youth.
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