Blogging away...

I agree that meeting Richard Rubin was a pleasant surprise! He almost made writing the way he does seem effortless… yet he stressed the effort that he has put into it. It was so neat to be able to listen to an author discuss a story he wrote and tell you the inspiration behind it. When I read “November,” I remember actually thinking about what the author of that story must have gone through in real life to spark the piece. I remember thinking that he seemed to know some interesting people – so it is funny to me how his characters are really just pieced together. I have never consciously pieced together various aspects of a personality to form one character in a story. I agree with most of this class that writing the past two pieces – Observing the Familiar and the Unfamiliar, as well as Assignment 4, were extremely difficult for me. When I sat down to write Assignment 3, I started by describing a cell phone in a way I thought made it inconspicuous that it was about a cell phone. Then I realized that cell phones come in all different shapes and sizes, and I had only been one with a similar structure to my own. I scratched that, and started to describe a fantasy world. I quickly realized that since the world was not vividly formed in my own mind, there was a good reason why I fought to find words to put on the page. I eventually ended with attempting to mix two worlds – describing a girl in a shower, but she does not know she is in the shower (and the reader isn’t sure where she is because they have an extremely close-up description of her location, so it seems abstract). Then, she finds the shower head handle and turns it on, douses herself in water, and you realize she was in the shower. It was a pretty lame idea. My intention was to then place her in an unfamiliar world (the fantasy in my mind that I would try to matter-of-factly relate to the reader), but that went nowhere. As for Assignment 4, I struggled, for the second time, in coming up with a person with a problem. It’s funny that Richard Rubin said that no matter how far out the character or his problem is, the author must always be able to relate. For my first story, I wrote about a teenaged boy with an obsession with stuffed animals whose mother takes on the obsession once he leaves for college. I am not a boy, I never got into the stuffed animal phase (aside from Beanie babies – but even those, they were purely a decoration to me, I never played with them). I preferred soccer, ground hockey, legos and train sets as a little kid, and grew bored of always playing the baby of the family when I played with dolls with my girlfriends. Also, my mother is one of the most sane people I know, so I really had no personal relation to my made-up story. But when Richard Rubin said that, it still made me wonder what connections I might have felt when writing it.