The Personal Journey

Writer's Block

When I first part this journey when it came to writing the stories the best way it could be described is writer's block.  For the initial story I had to take existing articles that I had chosen and turn them into stories.  One of those stories had to be from the perspective of an individual and the other story had to be a collective one describing a community in the future.  This part of the exercise had me stuck for almost four weeks and I was finding it very hard to get unstuck in this part of the process.  This resulted in the stories just getting put further and further off.

Fast-forward to about four weeks in at the start of the weekend for week five all of sudden it seems that I was able to find some creative flow.  This had to do with some advice to just focusing on applying the techniques that we were learning in class to the stories and not necessarily worry about the content that was getting created.   First worry about getting something down on paper, and the quality can come after that.  Soon after that I was able to get roughly fifteen stories of questionable quality out in roughly one and a half weeks. 

Applications

The applications of the methods in the course were a great part of taking it.  One of my favorite things about the methods learned in this course is that they feel like they are universally applicable to all different types of storytelling mediums.  They are not just limited to stories of the future, they can also be applied to different types of stories such as historical fictions was one thing that I tried out.   What would be interesting for me is to see how maybe this could be applied to an interactive storytelling medium, such as a video game, and how those might be able to be used to help tell stories of the future as well, potentially giving the user a chance to experience different stories depending upon the choices they make within the game.

Reflections

Looking back on the course, overall one thing that I wish I had not get in the way is the writers block that I mentioned above.  It got in the way of the creative flow and prevented me from being able just get something down on a document and not care about the quality that was coming out.  It would have been great if I had tried to grasp the concept of the class earlier and realize that perhaps I just need to apply the methods and see what happens instead of trying to write a high quality story at the same time.

Overall, one thing that this class helped me to realize is that I am a slightly better writer than I thought.  Prior to this course I had never done any form of story writing, even just rehashing an existing story into another form.  The sheer volume of content that we had to write pushed me in a way that I have not had a chance to be pushed before.  It was great to get out close to fifty pages double spaced in about two weeks as that is something I have never thought that I was capable of doing, let alone that being trying to rewrite numerous stories in different ways.  This served as a confidence booster in my writing ability and this is something that I will take into the future from this class, let alone all the techniques that we learned for getting unstuck.