Metacognition: Short Story Writing

This past week, I finished writing the first full draft of my short story, Pink Slip. It is about a man who works on Wall Street and gets laid off because of the current recession. He decides that this change will allow him to see more of the world and enjoy life, so he goes home to his wife in a very excited mood. She, however, is furious, and the remainder of the story takes the reader through their conflict and how they come to terms with it, though don't fully resolve it. I've been working on the story for months now, and it's nice to see it finally coming together, though I think it still needs some work before it's publishable.

In writing the ending of my story, I thought long and hard about how to conclude the story without solving the married couple's problems, but also without leaving the story too open. I knew, with advice from Mr. Allen, that they could not just agree with each other and live happily ever after. So I decided that their fight would end with some event that would transition them both into a new place in their relationship, one that could handle the conflict they were going through without necessarily solving it. When I first sat down to write, I had no idea what this event would be, but as the words started transferring from brain to fingers to keyboard to computer screen, the ending became more and more clear to me. I decided that the wife would try to leave, but seeing as her car had been repossessed, she couldn't just drive away, so she just begins running. The protagonist pursues her, and soon they are in an all-out race. This makes them both more jovial and competitive, a more effective dynamic for their marriage than the mere traditional working-husband-with-housewife routine. Once he stops chasing after her because he is remarking at her beauty, she returns to her anger, though recognizing along with him that their relationship can work in their new circumstances.

This was probably the first time in my fiction-writing career that a storyline came to me so clearly, effortlessly, and successfully. I'm sure that the ending can be tweaked a little, but all-in-all I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out. I guess I've come to appreciate my instincts when it comes to writing. I always thought that Mr. Allen was being crazy when he said that the characters will actually "talk to you," but I believe that I experienced some of that as I wrote this story. I felt I understood my characters well enough that I knew exactly what would be a good ending for them. I'm very pleased that this story worked out the way it did.

Metacognition: Jane Eyre Writing Assignment

For the Jane Eyre writing assignment, I was in a group with Jon and Mitchel H. The topic of our dialogue transcript between Jane Eyre , Charlotte Bronte, and an imaginary academy student was The Quest for Personal Enlightenment. My group chose that prompt because it was something we had touched on briefly as a class, but that we wanted to explore further. I personally was quite excited to delve into this topic, which I believe is one of the most important themes of the story. And since this was not only a group project, but a dialogue between characters, there was so much room open for discussion and deep, critical thinking; it seemed the perfect opportunity to satiate my inquisitiveness about this topic.

From the minute our group began working, I could tell that the project was going to go smoothly. Our ideas meshed very nicely, which is not always easy when dealing with three strongly-opinionated people like us. We formed three questions that addressed the larger theme of the dialogue, dividing up the work into three pieces that interested each of us individually but also as a whole. We began working, quickly and efficiently, always with an ear open to help each other when we needed to bounce ideas off of one another. This dynamic was one that I had never before experienced in a group project, and one that fit well with my natural dislike for group work and collaboration: it's not that I dislike working with people, but I just cannot stand projects in which I am stuck doing all the work while others sit back and occasionally tell me what to do as if it is their right to do so. It was amazing, in this setting, how easily my thoughts came to me, and when they did not, how easy it was to turn to my group members for assistance.

We finished our individual sections within a little more than an hour, and from there we all read over each others' work, making small grammatical and spelling corrections and asking permission from the writer for making content corrections. This process was also fairly smooth, as we had already bounced enough of our ideas off of each other while writing that the editing was almost purely syntactic. At that point, within just a few hours from the first brainstorm, we had finished the project. That speed with which we completed such a seemingly demanding project astounded all of us. We compiled our portions in an entire essay, about 7.5 pages long, added the finishing touches, and sent it to Mr. Allen hours before the due date and time. This project was a both intellectually and emotionally rewarding experience.