Reflections on the first class, and the first readings.

The greatest takeaway that I found in the two readings were: mind your audience when thinking about how you tell your story (Vonnegut), but don’t allow your audience to dictate what your story is (Wallace). I can relate to the Wallace piece in the sense that I want everyone to love the horrible baby that is my writing, but what I truly felt was the fear and shame of showing it to anyone. Although I was the second to volunteer, reading my writing out loud was terrifying. However, I believe hearing my classmates’ writing was both insightful, and genuinely very interesting. The factor that I found most fascinating was that although given the same prompt each piece was wildly different from the other. Obviously, it was inevitable that our ‘terrible babies’ would be different, but to have such different approaches is what was most illuminating to me. When taking my approach to the prompt, although I had never read Vonnegut before, I feel that I channeled his writing with style. I, as the creator, understood exactly what I was feeling, but I had to keep in mind that the person reading my piece does not know me, and couldn’t even guess what was in my heart, and therefore I had to make my writing as accessible to a stranger as possible so that they might see the picture I was painting. The main idea I was trying to project was the feelings of abandonment that comes with loss. And more notably, try to tap into how although abandonment can be intentional and unintentional, the resulting feeling is just as painful. I wanted to get this message across by showing how the feeling of abandonment once felt, often becomes a reoccurring phenomenon for the abandoned party. I tried to execute this by having the barn be abandoned over and over. First by the farm animals, followed by the party animals, and finally by the dead loved one. While these feelings don’t echo my own (when it comes to the matter of death), I believed that it was a sensation that many others would find relatable, and that’s why I chose to depict the loss in this manner. In conclusion, I believe that I heeded Vonnegut’s advice in that I successfully translated my intensions to the reader, but I fell for the trap of writing for the reader, rather than myself, that Wallace was trying to warn against.