MID-BRIEF REFLECTION

What was difficult? What was easy?

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The most difficult thing is something I actually expected at the start: keeping to the word count. It was hard to find what words to cut out and what to keep, especially when there’s aesthetic imagery I want to keep in favour of something that would help give the drabble context. I also had to keep thinking about what I wanted to write next; I had to double and triple check that whatever I wrote next would actually be necessary in the drabble as a whole. This resulted in a lot of pauses and backtracking which made the drabble, something that I thought would only take twenty minutes, take at least an hour or more.

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Another difficult thing was finding a good idea to fit the prompts. They were vague, yes, but the concepts that I thought of tended to be too huge for the drabble and my wish to fit so much into this small word count was perhaps a bit too ambitious. I think this is why I found it especially hard with finding a good idea for the structured drabbles I planned, the week two and four ones specifically (series of events and mostly-dialogue prompts). These two weeks were also harder to connect with impact-wise, especially since the meaning behind them could be dependent on context. However, maybe I did okay with them since someone commented they actually liked it.

 

In contrast, the prompts I found easy were in weeks one and three (focusing on emotion/an action respectively), probably because they didn’t quite follow any certain structure and the prompt itself was quite broad on where and how I could roll with it. I could go on a tangent without worrying too much about wordcount and I could still have some semblance of impact within the writing.

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What learning outcomes have been met? What still needs to be improved on?

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I’m starting to get used to finding out what can be cut out from my drabbles and what’s still needed for the drabble to make sense. I still need to work on having some sort of structure, especially in regards to the prompts I had difficulty on (mentioned above), and maximise the impact of my ideas in such little word space. I’m starting to get the idea of how so now I can continue to utilize this idea and see how it goes now.

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What resources have I used so far? Have they been helpful?

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I recently got one of my fanfictions thoroughly beta read and had heavy feedback regarding the style of my writing. The person who gave me advice on my writing is someone doing a creative writing master’s in Massey University and it was incredibly helpful. The thing I took most from her advice was that I tended to use passive voice a lot instead of active voice as well as incorporated unnecessary words in my writing. Looking back on that feedback, I’ll apply it to what I write from now on to see if I can get more impact with my writing.

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I've also had a look at different resources to help me with the matter:

• Using the active voice - helped me better understand my friend's advice concerning the fact that I constantly used passive voice. The examples showed me how to better manage it.

• Cutting unnecessary words out - the list detailed here points out how many words I've been using unnecessarily. 

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Have any changes been made? What will be implemented going forward?

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There were quite a few changes I had to make to my proposal to make the process a bit smoother as I progress through the weeks:

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    One thing was one of the reflection questions: ‘was the original intent conveyed’ was changed to ‘was the original intent conveyed/changed in any way?’ This is because a few concepts were modified while I was writing the drabble to better fit the word count as well as fit the impact I wanted to give.

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    Some resources were changed as well. I didn’t find any of the links I provided particularly useful because they caused me to get somewhat stuck while writing. However, they did inspire me to try different methods from what they suggested, such as writing two hundred words and cutting it in half. Instead, I just thought about what I wrote as I went along and deleted whatever was unnecessary while keeping a very keen eye on the word count to keep as close as possible to the goal before going back and editing it to exactly one hundred words.

 

    One of the prompts were changed. The week four drabble prompt of ‘dialogue-only’ was changed to ‘dialogue-driven with minimum description’ since some action does count as dialogue itself.

 

    Deleted the question ‘what was interesting’ just because everything about it is interesting and it’s hard to narrow down to a specific thing. I did accidentally answer that question in weeks three and four so I’ll keep them.

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    Lastly, I changed the intent of the second draft. Instead of rewriting the drabble, I chose instead to do a completely different premise than the first drabble based on that prompt.