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Workshop Reflection

I feel as thought the first person point of view is one of the strongest aspects of my draft. It lets the reader into the mind of the main character and I think it's effective and serves its purpose well. I do feel like the draft is a little short, however I can't figure out what might be missing and I hesitate to add too much too it and over-saturate the narrative. This is something I'd like to see addressed in the workshop. The story is about a guy who works in a corporate human resources department who goes about his daily duties which involve firing, or perhaps a better way of saying it is "terminating," employees. One of the challenges in writing this was using a first person point of view. I commonly use first person in my creative non-fiction work, but not all that much in my fiction work. In Workshop 2, I hope to make my critiques clearer and easier for the author to understand and then implement changes. I also hope to learn from my critiques to help fu
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Fabulism

             In previous exercises I had worked on developing my story’s main character, Jerry. When I began writing my first draft however, I realized there need to be some other aspect to his life that would cause the decision he needed to make more difficult. I decided that Jerry would work for his dad in his home town. I thought that this ultimately worked because it made Jerry go back and forth in his head as to whether or not he was happy with his future and should leave his home town to do what he wanted to do, or was it more important to him to carry on the family business.
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Workshop

            One of the aspects of my story that I feel is working pretty well is the dialogue. I feel like it reads in a way that is realistic and also helps move he plot forward as well as offer additional information about the characters. I also feel like the overall plot of the story works well, and it’s structured in a way that makes sense. I do think that my descriptive language could probably be improved. That has typically been a weakness of mine.             One of the main questions I would like the workshops to address is does the plot make sense and is it easy to follow. That seems really simple, but to me that’s one of the biggest pieces. When writing, it’s easy for me to get carried away because I know how the story ends and what path it takes to get there. I like to make sure that what I’m thinking comes across properly to the reader.             The internal conflict for my character is whether or not he is happy with the direction his life is going. There’s nothing
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Developing A Character

Dear Diary, I'm tired of getting pushed around. I'm tired of people taking advantage of me. I've been pigeonholed as a nice guy, but that's beginning to be used against me. Without even talking to me first, people just use my stuff without hesitation. All they think is, "Oh, it's just Jerry's, he won't care." Thing is, I do care. I feel like I'm being pushed around, by everyone constantly. But I let them. That's the problem. I need to be more assertive. Let people know what I think and why I think it. It'll may rub people the wrong way, but eventually they'll get used to the new Jerry. I think in some previous exercises I had touched on the idea of Jerry being a little bit of a pushover, so I thought that it would be interesting to latch onto that as a character flaw. I think it's interesting to have a character who knows what one of their flaws is and wants to address it.
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Characterization

When I write, I think I tend to have a bad habit of developing a character's backstory. I think I'm pretty thorough once they are introduced to the story and then during the story, but what they've done before is sometimes lacking. I do think sometimes I've written stories in which the characters backstory is either not relevant or is intentionally ambiguous, but I'd like to get away from that a little. I think that creating a "likable" is to create a character that the reader will relate to on some level. People like to put themselves in the stories they read and when they see a small piece of themselves in the character they're reading about, they'll be drawn to that character. My favorite thing about creating characters is taking traits and characteristics I've seen in real people and mixing and matching them to create new hybrid characters that suit the story that I need them for, but since they're based on things I've observed,
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3 Great Fiction Writing Blogs

Here are a few blogs about writing that I found useful: The Writers' Academy Blog This blog has a ton of articles that a writer would find useful. I like how it has a combination of articles that are helpful on more of a craft level as well as articles that are more industry or career centric. Helping Writers Become Authors This blog is written by K.M. Weiland, an author who also mentors other authors. Her blog has some great posts that get into the nitty gritty of writing. She covers things like creating character arcs, tips for writing stronger dialogue, and how to structure a novel. The Write Place Founded by Joe Bunting, a writer himself, this site is dedicated to improving your writing especially if your ultimate goal is to become a published author. The site offers some interesting articles as well as some course that you can take and contests.
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