Thursday, March 22, 2012

Week 10 (3/19-3/25)

Wreckage of Reason

            This week we again shifted focus from Bird by Bird, back to Wreckage of Reason.  While I enjoy reading Bird by Bird more than Wreckage of Reason, mainly because you are learning how to write from a published author, I always tend to have fun reading Wreckage of Reason because how different some of the stories are.  Reading all these different short stories, that have so many different writing styles, and different forms of writing, really helps give me some ideas for when I hit a writer’s block.  Some of the stories in this book are so bazaar and different that I would have never even thought to have wrote it that way.  It makes me wonder how there authors come up with these weird formats and writing styles.  I really enjoyed reading what was assigned this week.

            One of the eight short stories that we read that I really enjoyed was on page 191, and is called, The Woman, by: Nina Shope.  I really didn’t overly enjoy this piece of writing in terms of the content but I thought it was very interesting in how it was written.  The grammar was very strange because sometimes it was right and sometimes it was wrong.  Sometimes there are periods at the end of sentences and sometimes they are placed at the end of fragments.  She used the word “we” at the beginning of most of the sentences.  The entire story is just the author, Nina, writing about things that she did with this “woman”.  She wrote about the time they spend together, and about how she felt about her.  It is like she is documenting her time with this woman and how she made her feel.  I personally didn’t like the style that she wrote this in because it is far to centered around one person.  I also thought that it got a little boring because of how repetitive she was when using the word “we.  It was definitely a funny read, and a different perspective on writing.

            The next story that I found interesting was called, A You War Story.  It is written by Summer Brenner and is located on page 258.  The first thing that I liked about this story was how short it was.  It got right to the point and told how the author was feeling.  She states right away that her lover just went away, and started to write about him.  This turns into a form of a love letter or sob letter about the person that left her.  Also it could be interpreted as someone just complaining about how they were treated by their significant other.  It seems like she was upset about her lover leaving her and so she decided, as a form of stress relief, to just write down all the things that are going through your head at that moment.  She also talked about all the great times that they had together over time and how he left her because he got bored with her.  She states, “But things can only please a person for so long”, I guess her time just ran up and it was her time to go. 

            Finally the last short story that I really wanted to talk about was Ten Birds.  This is located on page 277, and was written by Karen Brennan.  This was another story that attracted me because of how different it was.  The story wasn’t written in your typical story form, instead it was written in sections that were numbered all the way from one to ten, instead of written in your typical paragraph format.  It isn’t the way that I would have written a story but that’s what makes what we read this week so much fun, it really is so different from your typical writing format.  The reading from this week along with the first half of Wreckage of Reason from three weeks ago has really taught me a lot about writing how I want to and how to be creative when picking your format to write in.

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