Research Journal

#4

I am in the process of actual writing my Genre and I am struggling! I am trying to capture the essence of my genre and yet add my own taste to how I am writing it. I want it to sound like me and yet not give the reader this feeling that they cannot place what genre they are reading. I am struggling with not feeling as though I am not doing the work justice in the sense that someone would read my piece and want to write one of their own. I keep redoing what I have written because I cannot find a sense of the perfect balance between the style of what I would like to say through the genre and the tone I normally write within. I think it is because I am so used to just rewriting what the teacher has already told me, I am almost overwhelmed with all this freedom that this project gives me.

On the other hand I have found that this has sparked something inside me to keep writing something each month in a different genre because this has tested me some much. It has really made me sit down and think about what my voice is within a work. Before everything I wrote was like a bland oatmeal and I got to add the spices of my choosing. While doing this work I have found that I need to combine my spices I write with, with the spices of genres already established. I have found that it takes a more skilled writer to write in a “wild” genre rather than one that takes only the skill of regurgitating knowledge. I have found a beauty in both the “classic” version of writing, aka a five-paragraph essay, but also the craft in picking a more out of the box writing, like the interactive fiction.

I am finding a few moments of “flow” amongst all the “wobbling”. There are moments when I find the groove and I don’t feel as though I have to delete everything I have written. Only creating one path, the path that leads to my belief, I think it has made it a lot easier to get my thoughts on paper. Rather than worrying about how everything is going to connect I can focus on what I am trying to say. On the flip side I think that is why I am struggling. Most of the examples I have pulled up are about the story telling, more about the journey than what the journey has to say. Most of the stories hope to really place the reader within the world that has been created. My story is trying to place the reader within an abstract version of the schooling system. The whole concept of my “Choose Your Own Adventure” is about the understanding what my journey is saying, I am still trying to make it about putting the reader in the feel of being a student who feels demolished by the schooling system in place now and yet it is abstract so the reader may not comprehend it in the way I was hoping.