final extra credit blog

I have learned much more this semester than I thought i would. I learned that in poetry you can do almost anything you want with any kind of exercise. All the way from grabbing random words from a poem to stealing one line and using it to start off a story and just going. It's all about having an original idea and just building on it. I find this fascinating in that I always have a running imagination and this is a way where I can let it go and see where it takes me. This even goes for writing fiction stories. Because it's fiction it doesn't matter if certain parts don't make sense by themselves just as long as it works with the story. This opens up the door for infinite possibilities and anyone can make a great story.

I came from going to class being a chore to actually enjoying coming and talking about different stories and ideas. It's a place where anyone's opinion counts and nothing is judged, at least I don't judge. I can take concepts and ideas from this class and apply it to many other things. My favorite fiction story that I wrote is about the man making his own religion. It's exciting to take some idea or concept that I've seen and write a story that has that idea in mind but in a different way. This way of writing makes me realize how shows like "south park" come up with their ideas for their episodes. All it is some concept they take from real life and they exploit the flaws and comedy of it. I wish I was talented enough to consistently come up with ideas for stories and have them be good.

Overall I really enjoyed this class and I'm glad I could take something away from it. Most gen eds don't really have a point but if at some point in life I ever get bored with what i'm doing then I can just write short stories. It's entertaining and fun and who knows, maybe one day i'll have a story that's really good and I can publish it.

Goldberg

I enjoyed the writing "I don't want to die". I like the way it talks about how many writers go through many internal conflicts. I can really relate to how i will get excited with a story and I'll just run with it and forget to close it or leave holes in the plot. You really do need to be calm and have a plan of action for the story or else it's like running into it like a chicken with its head cut off. What I don't understand however is this drive for writers to create absolute masterpieces. They will go through great trials in their self just to produce one story. It's almost like they're trying to force it instead of just letting it happen. Sometimes nature needs to take its course and we should just flow with it.

When i read "The Samurai" I saw what i've seen in other writing pieces. It talks about how almost every author creates many bad pieces and there's no point in trying to make them good. If it's not happening then it's not happening. The expression they used was "It's like trying to beat a dead horse into running again". Everyone likes to critique others writing and what the author was trying to say is you can't fix everything. Sometimes it's just broken and there's nothing to be done about it. I understand this in that sometimes you feel like someone's on to something and maybe you can perfect it but first impressions can be deceiving. What every author is trying to do is get that one piece that has everyone talking and gets a good emotion out of them.

fiction packet 3

When we were doing poetry I didn't have that much of an interest but now that we've moved onto fiction stories I'm extremely interested. From the fiction packet 3 there were two stories that I enjoyed the most. The first was "the singing fish" and the second was "the falling girl". Both had interesting elements to them and they stood out the most of all the short stories.

The singing fish upon first read was very confusing. When i read it a second time i realized if you replace certain words like "fish" with human it makes much more sense. They're talking about going into a cave and seeing all these markings and talking about how words have other meanings. A direct quote for this is "isn't every thing a word hidden and hiding as something else?". This shows that the point of the story is to try to say even if someone shows or says something it has many meanings and it might not be the one we originally think of. I like this concept because everyday we see huge misunderstandings and if everyone just thought of this there would be much less fighting or disputes.

The falling girl was my favorite story of them all. The fact that it's symbolism for a girl who has all these life decisions and she passes them up and all of a sudden she's old is intriguing. What I get out of it is that life is full of opportunities and it might not necessarily be what we envisioned but we shouldn't pass them up. If this happens then our life will feel meaningless and full of regrets. Everyone wants to be remembered and looked up upon but the only way to do this is to fully accept who we are and do what we have to do. When she doesn't make a splatter or sound when she hits the ground lets me think that her life had no impact on anything. I think this story is full of symbolism and can be taken anyway but that's what I get out of it.

Fear anger and joy, fiction packet 2.

Fear anger and Joy story.

Strange creepy shadows come from the closet at night. Creeks and squeeks come and go all through the night. Anything could be there, a worm hole could be bringing monsters in which are waiting to strike. Even though I check the closet it still makes me wonder. Could they have cloaks that turn them invisible? Nothing will ever be Known, things never seen, secret experiments not remembered. The night is the only trigger for the unknown because we can't prove something's not there if it's not seen.
I can't hold still. The closet has haunted me my whole life. Something needs to be done. I can't keep feeling like this. My blood constantly pumping and heart beating as fast as what feels like a humming bird's wings flapping in the air. I want whatever is there dead. it can no longer exist while I do. Either it goes or I go!
Excited to see my fear and anger gone. No more will I be haunted. This feeling is nothing I've felt before. Long was I scared of the unknown. I jump up and down screaming out of the room. All is done and the unknown has lost its worth.

Fiction Packet 2.

"My Internship"
I really enjoyed this short story because i'm currently applying for an internship. The main question that comes up in the author's head comes up in mine. I always wonder how i compare or will compare to the other interns. I've never had them say stay away from my adviser but that certainly would be interesting if they did. The way he thinks he's special is i'm sure how everyone thinks. Most people don't want to be just another average joe. They want to be remembered or stand out in some way and in a good way. So could this intern just be fooled and he's thinking he's different than the rest or is he actually just another intern to the man and he's treated the exact same as everyone else? This makes me wonder about how other people perceive me and not necessarily how i think i am seen. Overall by far my favorite story of the packet because I can relate and understand it the most.

the letter from home

I thoroughly enjoyed "The Letter From Home" because it described so much in so little paragraphs. I felt like i saw a huge period of time and there wasn't much read. The adjectives and verbs were so unique like "the fridge hummed, the curtains billowed up". I would never think to write something like that yet it made so much sense to me. It's nice reading something i could potentially think up yet still would most likely never be thought up. When i read this story i get the feeling that the person writing the letter is at the point in her life that she has to do something she doesn't like at all and is waiting for the day that it all changes. The fact that she says at the end of the story "I turned and rowed away, as if i didn't know what i was doing.". This to me lets me think that she is just floating by through life at the moment and is looking for something better than what is already available to her.

fiction packet

Earlier i read the fiction packet and i really like the way that they described everything. i didn't really tell us what was going on necessarily but would say what everyone was doing or certain things that one could see so the rest was visualized by the reader. At first i didn't even realize what was going on until i thought about it. They were well done in that i got the full picture but not in the way i'm used to. I found the baby at the liquor store story the most interesting. I don't know why someone would bring their baby to their liquor store, but this women seemed to have it all figured out. It seems that the baby is the most interesting thing in the world to her because it's her's. If someone else was the parent of the baby i don't think the person telling the story would be nearly as interested.

I also wrote a short story about physics land.

Physics land - air is not felt, it has the smell of water vapor everywhere, things are not seen but observed, sounds are hear if heard from the right distance, nothing is tasted but sensed through taste buds. A man named bob lives in this land and chases the way to break the unwritten laws. There is no way to break them and there are no consequences. One day bob however decided that if something were to have a negative weight and be made of nothing it would repel gravity. Bob used his particle divider and blew apart a big red box so that it was nothing and nothing was everything. The box then set off a chain effect which made all of the rules of physics land collapse in on its self and then Bob and everything he new was turned from everything into nothing.

The Book Bird by Bird was much more interesting then i thought it would be. Reading about how the writter grew up and seeing all these "secrets" of being an author revealed was fascinating. A line i found quite hysterical was "The United States of Advertising". This was so true in that no one really knows how things should be they just follow what the media and what companies selling us a product want us to believe. This is even how an author gets his ideas because of the show Californication i think that famous authors have amazing lives and get laid all the time. This as i read "Bird by Bird" showed me that this was indeed not at all true, most of the time anyways. The chapter Shitty first Drafts was my favorite part of the book those. This is exactly how i am with everything. I do a shitty job the first time, pretty good job the second time, and an amazing job the third time. I'm just better with learning from mistakes and fixing them. I don't think that i'm necessarily a writter myself but it can be applied to other things too.

Introduction

My name is Charlie Ball and i grew up in Ann Arbor. I'm currently a junior at EMU and am going for my bachelors in Chemistry and minor in Accounting. I enjoy my job of officiating high school soccer and basketball. I'm taking this class in order to fulfill a Gen Ed requirement and I've always had a little interest in creative writing.