Reflections On Writing In This Class

When I initially decided to take Food and Travel Writing, I knew that it was a class that interest me greatly and help me develop a style of journalistic writing that I had not previously experienced but was curious about. While I looked forward to this class with great energy and enthusiasm, I didn’t see it at first as an incredibly challenging course. My mind changed from the moment I stepped into the classroom, not only because it did become a challenging environment where we were encouraged to think critically in discussion and to read texts thoughtfully, but because it challenged me the most as a writer.

I had always envisioned myself being able to write about food and location fairly easily. How hard could it be? You simply had to provide the reader with rich descriptions and details. But it was much harder than that. I found myself struggling to describe to others the very real experiences or memories that I had, unable to share with them my feelings and why the topics I chose to write about where so important to me.

For my process writing, I really want to focus on the larger assignments that we work-shopped in class and revised on our own. This is not to say that I did not take away anything from my reading responses, but is because it would be incredibly difficult to go as in-depth as I would like to with as many pieces of writing as we completed for this course.

Workshop for me was something that I didn’t look forward to but that I knew was very important for both the development of my piece as well as the development of me as a writer. I loved getting input from everyone but I disliked how the focus was on me in a way that was forced and much like pulling teeth. I also felt like most of the time, I knew what people were going to say because they were the holes I too, had seen in my piece. There were times though that I really appreciated workshop, like when something was pointed out to me that I hadn’t noticed before, my view was challenged, or an idea I hadn’t considered was brought forward.

The challenge really began with my memoir. I had this incredibly rich and memorable experience that I wanted to share with others, yet I kept them at an arms length. It was never something that I did intentionally but it was something that happened in effect of how I was examining the experience. This became a trend in all of my pieces in this class. It was incredibly frustrating to recognize this but not know how to address it without confronting the bigger picture that was causing it.

Like all writers, my writing is greatly connected to the events that take place in my life and the challenges that I am facing. Once I realized that I was keeping my readers at a distance, I knew that there was something deeper that I needed to face. I wasn’t letting people in for a reason, and that was being reflected in my writing. So slowly, with deliberate effort and focus, I tried to open up and expose myself, and the experiences I was trying to describe in my writing, in a raw and real way. It was frustrating to reconstruct all of my pieces over and over again, in attempts to reveal the meaning I had taken away from the experience, only to realize I had did it again, and had completely glossed over the real point I wanted to show.

Listening to everyone’s feedback became extremely helpful, and critical to my understanding of that gaping hole in my writing. Yes, the words were there, and they flowed beautifully, but where was the meaning? Why did everything fall flat? When I started addressing that emptiness in my writing, I was finally able to face it in my own life. It was a painful and excruciating process, like extracting one stinger at a time and examining it until my head hurt. It’s difficult because my breakthrough in my writing and in this class came alongside a huge breakthrough in my thoughts and life at large, which is something that is personal and very hard to explain. Something had happened in my life that made me shut up my heart and mind from the world, drawing the blinds on any opportunity to share those experiences in a way that would be rewarding, for both the reader and me.

It’s a delicate process, and it’s not one that I have mastered yet. But slowly and surely, I am getting there. I think that my final revisions greatly reflect the effort I have put forth to overcome this obstacle in my writing, and in my life. I’m starting to understand it and be able to work with it, which is definitely heading in the right direction. All of this has really made me realize what I will face continuously as a writer in my life. My experiences and the events that happen in my life will constantly be entering into my writing, which is a good thing, but it is something that I need to learn how to manage. I can’t gloss over everything with pretty words and soft language. I have to say what needs to be said, and I think that I need to care about the reader’s development and understanding as much as I care about my own.

It’s been wonderfully challenging, and I am sure that I will carry those challenges on after this class has ended. I am so grateful that this class has made me face the music more than once, and helped me to understand what it is that writers do, and how they do it well. Writing, after all, is not quite like riding a bike. It is like trapeze, something that must be artfully learned, practiced, and understood. This class taught me how to fly, but more importantly, it taught me how to stand tall and climb each rung of the ladder up to the platform, every time I fell.