Final thoughts

Over the course of the semester I feel that I have learned quite a bit. My approach to creative writing began as very cynical but has progressed into something of which I am proud. I know about spelling and grammar and rules of standard American English, which have been very hard to break, but I now feel that a creative approach to writing is something of value that I will continue to experiment with. Thursday's class especially put everything into perspective, I think. Our discussion regarding how our blunt, honest, and creative insticts are beaten out of us from years of school really made me feel guilty and upset. It's unfortunate that writing has been labeled as something rigid and difficult by authority figures on the matter and that notion motivates me to break the chains of writing preconceptions, because they really appear to serve as more of a limitation in many settings.
In terms of my writing style, the Goldberg book has been very helpful. Most notable, though, are the bits about concrete detail. I know I've written about them in a past entry, but concrete detail has both simplified my writing attempts and made them exponentially better at the same time. I never knew that detail could be so concrete, I guess. Maybe the reason I had troubles in the past with details is because I put much emphasis on things that didn't really matter and things that didn't contribute to the plot. Who cares what color pants and character was wearing or what day of the week it was?
Another thing, I always struggled to describe things with words that really didn't describe so much as string a train of adjectives, one after another. But it's as simple as describing something that's concrete, like a "blue sea" to describe "her eyes," or like the "fire of a thousand suns" to describe "my body temperature after running around the restaurant in my struggle to wait on 10 tables at one time." Learning how to effectively describe using concrete details has been the most useful to me in my writing, especially my fiction/essay writing, over the course of the semester.

On Essay Packet Dos:

Living Close to the Knives was very moving and delivered a very upsetting message about the beginning of AIDS in the United States. I felt that much of the essay was lengthy and monotonous, but I changed my mind about it very quickly near the finish. It makes you physically ill to imagine that someone with AIDS, early-on in its developmet and priot to it's recognition as a non-discriminatory disease, would be reduced to the scum of society and forced to seek desperate treatment (like Typhoid!) to save his life. The idea that people were so ignorant in their approach to AIDS or to someone with the disease that they would refuse them treatment or refuse to touch/teach/be in the same room as them is just a tragic human injustice. To think that AIDS was a punishment by God  to the gay people of the world is just awful. Living Close to the Knives really pulled at my heart-strings, depicting a deteriorating man who tried to be feircely independent and in the end felt utterly alone despite the support he received from friends. It seems that AIDS began to affect his mental stability and it forced him to let go of his former life. The essay tells of the struggle of AIDS in a personal, emotional story that also shares the realities of popular conceptions; that people with AIDS should be quarantined on an island, that the governement withheld monetary and informational/research support  to combat the disease, that people homosexuals were and are murdered, humiliated, blamed for their association with this "death sentence."
The Fine Art of Sighing shows the connection of the entire human race with something so simple as a sigh. At a most simple notion, we are all the same; we share the same emotions, consider the same thoughts, breath the same air no matter where or who we are. The author first makes this simple fact of life so personal by discussing his mother and father and making the reader aware that not all sighs are created equal. Sighs can indicate emotions which the author narrating the inner thoughts that might have been going through his parents' heads as they let out that long gust of breath.
What is someone thinking? That's something that may never be known, but maybe the expresion of a sigh, however it is delivered, gives us a realistic idea of the secret life someone is leading (whether consciously of uncounsciously) within the confines of their skull. Is sighing just a reflex? I think the author would argue 'no,' I would argue 'no.' A sigh seems to often be indicative of something we wish we could say, but maybe don't have the words, or something that we're afraid to reveal. The author is able to give the reader a connection with an entire world of people (young, old, American, Chinese, Iranian, Korean, Russian) and in this instant one realizes that we are all the same afterall, one gains this sense of awareness that was so simple and yet we never thought of it before.