Metacognition - Short Story

I’d like to say that my story is kind of writing itself. I don’t mean that I think it’s meaningful, but it is surprisingly different from what I originally intended it to be. I think this is likely the result of a lot of things. Procrastination on my part, my setting out to write more than was practical, (a) movie(s) I’ve seen lately and music.

Originally, my story was going to be a pure tragedy. A man’s wife gets killed by a policeman and he essentially gets emotionally crushed. He loses all sense of morality as he sinks deeper into his feelings of anger and vengeance. He meets an old friend of his and he joins a local mob. He kills a couple people, and tells himself they somehow deserved it each time. Eventually, he is told to kill his friend, but is unable to, he can’t go that far. Then, his friend kills him.

After a few weeks, I realized I had neither the patience nor the time to write enough in order to get everything necessary written. As such, my first couple of attempts at writing it were patchy and hard to follow. I knew I had to completely change the way I thought of the story, yet I was reluctant to throw away what I had written.

It took me a couple of weeks to figure out what to do.

I kept the very end of what I had written, him trying to kill his friend, but getting killed. But in between I added chunks of boring, everyday life. I attempted to make this second (or real?) life as boring as possible.

The premise is one of the two lives is a dream. I’m not even sure which life is his real one. As the drafting process goes on, I might decide, but I kind of like leaving it up for interpretation.

One of my goals is to try to condense the paragraphs of philosophical thought that are here and there and incorporate them into the story itself better.

All in all, I like where this project is going, as well the steps Mr. Allen has put in place in order to encourage but not force.

Metacognition - Jane Eyre Writing Project

This project... was unique. The thing that is closest to this project was the first semester final, in which we had to create a dialogue of sorts between characters from different books we’ve read.

This was obviously different. For starters, instead of being able to pick and choose from various characters, we were given an author, a character written by said author and a student who has read the book. This is obviously less flexible as we are unable to choose characters in such a way that allows us to best create an interesting dialogue. This isn’t to say we were unable to create thought-provoking things in the Jane Eyre Project, we simply given less ways to reach that interesting dialogue.

Another difference that was rather important is that one of the participants had written the other. It was an interesting thing to approach. Surely the main character has ideas very similar to that of the author? It was a challenge of distinguishing between thoughts of the character and the context of these thoughts within the plot and setting, which then allowed us to access the thoughts of the author. We found they both had similar ideas, yet had found different ways of characterizing them. The author, being a real person, was much more cynical regarding love, though she agreed on what it was.

But how do we go about creating such a dialogue? Interestingly enough, our final dialogue was actually the result of a four hour dialogue amongst ourselves. Although none of consistently represented a certain participant, the ideas from our actual discussion were extrapolated into the writing project (though phrased much more eloquently). In this way, I believe the presence of two other group members largely made up for the lack of choice regarding discussion participants.