Switching Gears

Ahhh! I have been breaking my own rules and neglecting the blog for the past two weeks, but that ends now. After an exhausting finals week, I am done with the school year and now will have far more time to work on my writing and give this fledgling website the attention it deserves. This week I finally finished work on “The Sundown”, my independent study final piece, and I believe it may just be the best short story I have ever produced. After many intense rounds of revision with my mentor, Mr. Litten, and the cutting down of the story nearly in half and down to flash-fiction length, my original vision is finally realized, and I feel like I am at last able to say something truly interesting. The new writing strategy that I mentioned in a previous post has been seriously coming in handy, and I believe it should allow me to hopefully continue with this high-level quality of work. After submitting this piece to as many literary magazines as I could find, I will now simply have to step back and hope that it can pass muster and secure some recognition by the powers that be. The process was very fun, and I feel as though I should note my final takeaways here as I learned so much from this experience. The integration of my new strategy played a major role in the quality of the final product, so I would hope to be able to pass on what I learned and note what I need to replicate in the future. My takeaways were as such: -Focus on "feeling" and emotional, profound moments rather than plot -Take it slow and do not force plot development or go into writing with a heavily structured idea -Cut as much fat as you can possibly find and never worry about having a longer length, padding kills narratives -Practice saying aloud any dialogue that you write, make sure it feels natural -Write what you are familiar with and what you can relate to at least some extent to -Write what you feel like writing, when you feel like writing, lest you get boring forced prose These tips made an extremely meaningful difference for me, and I hope to be able to share these with any prospective writers I can. Maybe the other members of the literary magazine would be a good place to start. Anyways, as I begin my new project this summer, I will need to make sure to take my own advice.