Camille Moser
Creative Writing Hybrid Genres
May 1st 2012
I have glue all over my feet. I had
a distinct vision of the direction this project was going and I can say
now, that its due today and
definitely not living fully up to my expectations. Pieces are missing, for godsakes. Big pieces, not to
mention, nearly all of the artwork I had hoped to stick in here, simply didn’t
happen. Or they happened and I ‘cut’ the scene I had drawn them for. I feel
like I accomplished the project to the extent of what the class called for, and
I definitely understood and touched on both of my genres. but the whole thing
comes down to planning ‘finished
product’ that was apparently way out of my abilities to successfully produce
under the circumstances and
alotted time.
I researched sketchbooks and
personal memoirs so I could make (what is essentially) a big shrine to a
memorable coming of age experience that happened after my freshman year of
college. I wanted to make a quirky, personal story that tied together the visual
elements of sketchbooks with the personal elements of memoirs. I wanted it to
be informal and largely based on a journal I kept during my time that summer.
Eventually
I started to grapple with the coherency of the journal. It was a disjointed
cluster of personal musings it didn’t have a followable plot. And whether or
not I liked it, I had a third genre to deal with: the english class. And that
audience sortof needed a plot to follow. So I ultimately took out the journal
entirely and wrote the story, according to the plotlines I wanted to focus on
in the story. As I was writing
this, it started to get out of hand. And I knew I had to cut out a lot of
pieces that were not contributing to the story as much as others. It became
seriously paired down, but I could see the story clearer and it was STILL
beyond overwhelming to write the thing. I didn’t even write the end. I am
appalled. The end is crucial.
Things got nuts because I wanted my
story part to be hand written and pasted in my book. So I rewrote everything in
nice (er) handwriting on the same kind of paper for the book. This took an
obscene amount of time. We’re talking 8:00 am to 5:00 pm straight through no
breaks (except for bathroom & coffee) and that was only one small part of
the story. Absolute tortuous carpal-tunnel inducing activities that I forced
myself to complete. Its not really complete, like I said, theres 1 hole and a
missing ending.
Overall, it was extremely flawed,
but I was happy with the story, for what it was. Its more coherent than it was
and I got the opportunity to exercise my creative writing abilities, which was
nice and kindof fun at parts. Especially since I was trying to 1.) pull from a
really fuzzy, pieced together memory, and 2.) I was trying to do in a style that
had feeling and a sense of creative writing as well as make it my style and
humorous. Such a challenge and despite my hinderances in the vocabulary
department, I thought I achieved what I was going for pretty well.
The art was a different story. That
was one of those things, I learned (sort of not until the end) that needs to be
saved for last. Words first, pictures later. And because my words took so long,
my pictures don’t really make sense
and are, to say the least, incomplete.
It was all very time consuming
elements coming together to make this happen. And ‘this’ was way out of my
grasp of achievement abilities when I had so many other things to focus on. It
was hard cause this was my baby, and I wanted to do it right. And in the end,
on the due day, I am covered in glue, no sleep, and not even packing a product
I had set out to complete. I
completed the requirements for class but not the requirements for me.
Oh! One last thing, you know how there is always that unexpected
obstacle that rears its ugly head in a project? Well mine was the glue. It was
around 1 in the morning and I had used up all my gluesticks! I never thought I
would run out, but there I was, on the floor, sitting in a sea of used up
gluesticks. And I was barely half way through! So I went through a serious of
other adhesive products, the worst being the tacky glue, which I had tons of,
but no control over. It slowed my progress down significantly and I have tacky
glue on almost all regions of my body. I have tacky glue on my pillow. That is
not cool. But yea things were going lovely until the glue dillemma came up, but
hey, if it wasn’t the glue it would’ve been something else.
Despite my personal issues with
organization and planning and such, I loved doing this project because it gave
me the opportunity to focus on something I was (patheticly) obsessed with. And during the process of tapping into
all those memories, I picked up a lot of things about me and others that I
hadnt noticed before, and that was kind of neat in itself. And it gave me
freedom. I rarely, rarely get any freedom to be creative my way, and it was a
nice outlet to use all that pent up creative energy I have floating around
these days.
