Journal #1: What do you like, find interesting, etc.? What kind of an artist’s book are you thinking of? Can you think of ways that two different genres of art work together to harmonize or synergize? Explain. Be ready to chat on this next class.
The artist’s books I find particularly interesting are the ones that aren’t like traditional stories. The ones that are accompanied with things like memos and notes that enhance the story being told. In the regular book ones, the illustrations are nice, especially the ones that look more like comics, but for this project I think changing the entire format would be really cool to experiment with.
The performative movie-videos by past students were also an interesting take on the format of this project. Taking the character and showing them interacting with the book(reading, writing, etc.) brings the audience even closer to the subject. However, the choice to make one of those videos in fact takes away from the effectiveness of the book itself. We are experiencing the story with the character(s) instead of reading about them.
After taking some time to think about different kinds of art coming together, I believe that video games could be a good example. They are like films in the visual and auditory sense while also taking time to tell a story. With so many different kinds of art coming together, it makes sense that films are both so popular and yet so criticized. Unlike films, however, video games have the added benefit of allowing the audience/player to actively engage with the story and the characters. In this way, the player’s choices have the potential to affect how the story is told.
Journal #2: After doing the reading in Bird By Bird, take a look at your notes. What concrete things did you appreciate in the reading? What sticks with you? What resonates?
The author is seemingly taking the expectations of writing, of being successful and making a career out of it, and telling the class that their expectations are not always true. Not everyone will be successful, not everyone will get published, and yet those things aren’t the purpose of writing. Everyone has their own goal, and while there is certainly the motive of monetary gain, a lot of times writing is less focused on the marketability and more on the story it’s trying to tell.
I certainly understand the difficulty with just sitting down to write. I struggled with it for this short story openers assignment. Getting everything else done or having to put it out of your mind for even an hour can be an arduous task. You look at the blank screen and the cursor blinking and wonder what to do. Yet, once I really started typing, I remembered why I love writing so much. The harmony of ideas and noises in your head flowing out of your fingers to the steady taps of the keyboard, making one word, then two, and soon you have a sentence, then a paragraph. Even just writing this seems so… right in a way. Then, I’ll look back on it and discover that it doesn’t make sense or goes on too long and there the process begins again. As the author tells us, writing can be a confusing, frustrating, and rewarding process.
Journal #3
“Good with Boys” struck me as an unconventional story, one where Jill, the main character, had no hope of success from the beginning, and yet only the readers could see it. Jill prided herself on having an observant and logical way of getting what she wanted. Her character, as a character for this particular story, was perfect. Her motivations, behaviors, and inner monologue betrays exactly what she’s trying to hide: that she really is like the other girls. She’s just taking different actions to get to the same place they all want to be. Jill was annoying and creepy and has a one-track mind, but, based on her behavior at the very end of the story, I think these events will stick with her as she grows up and develops and gets better.
This does kind of lead me to my next point. Jill’s narration/inner monologue is amazing. Her desires, how she defended her actions, even her criticisms of herself and others was just so real, so relatable, especially for a preteen like her. I found myself understanding Jill, laughing with her, and sympathizing with her because of how I remember my experiences in middle school. At the time, I doubt any of us thought our actions could’ve been creepy or annoying or outlandish, and yet it seems so when looking back on it. I guess all of this is to say that by using Jill in these specific ways, Iskandrain invested me in the character development and makes me wonder what Jill would be like when she’s older. How different would she be? Would she acknowledge her mistakes and be working so she never makes them again? Would she get over her obsession with boys, and, if not, how would that translate into her adult life?
Journal #4
The first drafts we make are never going to be everything we dream of. At best, they’ll be okay, something where you read it and don’t immediately want to throw your laptop across the room. At worst, they’re something that has been word vomited on, and, now that all the ideas are down on paper, you start searching for the good or anything that can be passed off as good with some metaphorical make-up. I procrastinate pretty often, so there are times when the first draft is what I’m handing in, whether I like it or not. I don’t think this makes me a better writer, but I like to think it makes me more confident and familiar in coming to terms with a first draft.
It’s nice to remember that no one is perfect. That we read these beautiful, life-changing books, and the author behind them definitely had more days where they thought it was going to be horrible rather than what the readers saw it as. Creating art is just… the worst and the best. Why would authors and artists and anyone struggle through this process and have imposter syndrome just to come back and do it again? It’s a question I ask myself every time I sit down to write. It’s also a question that is answered when I watch the words on the screen appear and come together, even if they’re coming together horribly. There’s just something, for me at least, that is so wonderful and addicting about writing. Maybe I’ll be able to put it down in words one day.
Journal #6
The longevity of memory and how that translates into situations and characters was interesting. The lunch chapter talked about just remembering how school lunches “worked,” but the memories were so specific and weird and underwhelming. Popularity based on sandwiches? Consequences to the way your family lived? And yet, I know so many of those details intimately. Lunchables were king when I was in elementary school, but, once I got to high school, my friends would marvel over leftovers because of how common everything else was at that point. However, what really stuck out in this was at the end of the chapter when Lamott talks about the kid up against the fence and how when she remembers him now and will remember him again when she writes tomorrow. Such a small aspect can influence any creative work, but I have a feeling that kid is or will be the inspiration for a character. The details make up so much, and a reader can learn what the trumpet set beside his weirdly scuffed shoes mean or whatever lunch he may bring to school. This character chapter honestly makes me feel so much better about my Novel Writing November plans, because I’ve spent the last few nights trying to pin down who my characters are, but I think I simply have too many characters to do that at the moment. Or maybe I just need to focus on the primary main characters, iron them down, then let all of them evolve at their own pace.
