Some reflections on the course

Writing the third/final draft

Introduction

While writing possibly the last version of my story I tried to focus on two areas that were brought up in the second workshop; providing an epiphany and anchoring the story around the main character through point of view and zooming. In fact, in the end these two areas went hand in hand and helped to resolve each other. I will start by explaining changes to point of view and zooming.

Zooming

When I look back on my first draft I can see what a disaster it was in terms of point of view. I kept changing from first to third person and back to create distance rather than using the main character's observations and leaving the reader to infer the meaning of those observations. The most difficult part for me to change was the shift from the perception of the virtual world to the reality of the teenager's bedroom. In the first draft I used omnipresence and in the second draft I used another character (the mother). However, in this way I created more gaps for the reader to fill and perhaps ended up telling rather than showing. In the bedroom scene in the third draft I tried to use the teenager's shadow to zoom out from his perception to the reality and linked each observation to the next until I reached the top of the wardrobe and the photo that looked back at the teenager from a distance.

An Epiphany

In order to develop an epiphany for the main character I needed to make it clear that he had understood the reality of his father's death. This had not been achieved in the first or second draft due to the switch in character from protagonist to drone pilot and rather weak link in the words 'three years ago'. I had to find a way to tell the story of the pilot without going into her mind. Again, I tried to use the visual aspects of the drone, as seen by the main character, to provide information about the pilot and invoke an epiphany.

The Theme

I also needed to change the ending slightly from fighting in a war to drug dealing to link the ideas and context together and create a more feasible form of changelessness for the protagonist. I tried to incorporate suggestions to use the word 'click' to create a theme through the story. In fact, I changed the title, had the main character turn his mum off with a 'click' and finished the story with a 'click' of acceptance.

The Workshops

Peers and constructive criticism

I can definitely see how peer suggestions/corrections from the workshops have helped me develop as a creative writer. And there's still a long way to go... It isn't always easy to come back to your story and rewrite it though. Sadly, very often with my students there is just one draft that gets corrected by me and never seen again. I have experimented with peer corrections/suggestions but never asked my students to rewrite their text.

Another thing I found difficult was constructively criticising other people's stories. I'm not sure if this is because I consider myself very much a layperson in this department and didn't know what to say or because I didn't want to offend anyone. That said, my peers also seemed hesitant to express their opinions on each other's stories, perhaps this was due to similar feelings. We might have also had difficulty in feedback due to the synchronous CMC environment in which the workshops took place (adobe connect). issues such as not being able to read facial expressions and delayed audio for turn-taking might have made it more difficult to make a personal connection and develop trust. We had the opportunity to give asynchronous CMC feedback in the blogs but I personally felt a little bit restricted by the public nature of the blogs. One way to get around this might be to use a private space specifically for asynchronous feedback which could be referred to in the workshop.

Back to my F2F context, I think it might be useful for students to have specific areas to concentrate on and perhaps a set number of good and bad points to mention. It would also be a good idea to divide my classes up into smaller groups of three or four to avoid excessive reading loads.

The Future

I'm not sure if I will continue to write stories but I will definitely continue to blog and encourage my students to do the same. I have found engaging in a kind of 'self talk' through blogs to be very useful for reflecting on my learning, whether it be for creative writing or some other endeavour. I might find more enthusiasm for creative writing if I explore the idea of multimedia or trans-media story telling, especially in the form of a choose your own adventure or computer game. I think there is a huge difference between creating a story with images or video and one with text alone. In fact, what was interesting about the workshops was the fact that each reader interpreted the story in different ways. It seems that if you really want to communicate a specific idea you need to be very skilful with your words so that the readers are led to perceive the gaps in the way you intended. On the one hand, the use of images can act as a crutch for less confident writers but on the other it might offer less opportunities for linguistic development in L2. Looking back at my three drafts, I think I definitely used the technology as a crutch to begin with, took it away in the second draft and then reintroduced minimal use of images in the third draft. This might also work with my classes as a way of using digital technologies to overcome writer's block or blank page syndrome.