Reflections 3: reflect i shall.

What was your reaction trying to get the stories out? Was it limited? Difficult? How’d it go?

THIS (ryan’s question to the class of course), basically marked the start of week 3’s tutorial session.

Almost half the class found it easy, whilst the rest found it hard keeping to the word limit.
As for myself, I think it was a mixture of both (but I secretly [okay, maybe now it's no longer a secret. ohh bummer.] think i’m more inclined towards the ‘hard keeping to the word limit’ group)
Why?
The reason’s simple.
I’m a helluva nag.
The super long-winded me couldnt get myself to stop at 50.
I just kept going on and on till it struck me that it was only supposed to be 50-words long.
Another barrier was that I found it hard to start.
I tried using the method Ryan taught us on day one.
It didn’t help.
The only source of inspiration seemed (it appeared at that critical point of time) was the toilet, very unfortunately.

Anyhow, a few of us were picked to read out one of our very creative piece of works.
Oh boy was i one of the “lucky” few chosen ones, especially since i was the first to be picked. (i know i know, darn.)
So i read out my ingenius creation – the stalker (which apparently wasn’t so original after all).
the rest of the class was to work on our comments in the following format:

Author:
Title:
What it’s about:
What works:
What doesn’t:

Summary
Dom: Rejection taken wrongly
Colin: Loser trying to get girl, doesn’t get her and kills her.

What works
Vinod: people get the story easily and don’t think of anything else. Situation is imaginable.
Ben: Knife part was interesting (Ben didn’t expect the knife to appear, coming from a nerd)
Dip: the thought of a sixth-grade stalker killing someone; demented, unconventional.
Atiqah: -liked the story-

What doesn’t
Vivian: ending is unexpected/weird (didn’t expect the nerd to kill her)
Ben: its just what the nerd said; you just don’t expect that coming out from nerds.
Ryan: overly cliché – opening. A lil absurd, but its more like a black comedy to him, no issues with age.

With that, I shall try to work on new stuff with their comments and hopefully, it’ll help me write better (:

Out of the other few stories which were read aloud in class, i thought Vani’s flow in her story was really good, and that Colin’s story was really cleverly written (very innovative and fresh, in a way.) Amongst all of our stories, i found myself liking Dip’s the most. His use of language was really good; description – such that he didn’t have to state that it was boxing he was writing about. superb job!

Then we went through the whole Aristotle presentation thing.
Oh boy, there’s just so much ancient-ish stuff going through that guy’s mind man!
I’m finding it hard to grasp all his weird (but good, since it’s recognised by many people) theories and longlonglong (and complicated) names!!

Gee man.. Writing has always been a simple task for me.
However, its starting to become no easy feat.
I’ve lost all my creative juices.
-sigh-