This assignment frightened me. I am loathe to make a bad first impression while fearful that that is the inevitable result anyway. I have hesitated, procrastinated, and become intimidated so much that I must make myself answer directly and pointedly.
Thus, I have formatted the prompt and my responses in the style of an interview.
Why are you taking this course:
First, I am taking this course in order to fulfill my English Writing Major. I am required to take a "Topics" course. This particular topic, "NonFiction in the Information Age" seemed to fit that balance between interesting and practical. I had acknowledged that most journalism is typed, published, and posted over computers and cell phones, so I ought to become better acquainted with the world of social media, if I am to become any kind of writer at all.
What do you hope to learn?
I suppose I simply want to learn how to navigate through that world. I felt overwhelmed just to hear the title of the course, and now I am terribly overwhelmed with the thought of diving into this Internet infinity in my sense of insignificance. Perhaps my path is narrowed to this: I want to know how to contact and how to work for places that would hire and network with writers, and how writers begin working for such places. Honestly, I feel rather aimless, but maybe I would write for work if I were only given directions.
What kind of writing would you like to do?
I have yet to prove myself as a writer, and I have not been working hard enough to attain the status. Honestly, I became involved with English writing simply because I received generally good feedback in different English classes. Professor Jen Lee said that my strength might be in essay writing. People have said that I write very carefully, and that I tend to write with personal introspection, angst, and to reach a few good and succinctly written flashes of insight. My assignments were simply "well written." I don't mean to boast. Actually, I tell English professors that I write "because I suck at everything else," and even with their encouragement, my goals in writing were ill-defined. Simply put, I write carefully because I care about what I'm researching and what I'm feeling. I write carefully because I'm respectful and terribly fearful.
Throughout school, I tended to write about foreign cultures and about feeling isolated - so I suppose that I like to write about aliens and feeling alienated. These are my themes. But I also like to believe that I'm writing on someone else's behalf - to care about someone else's alienation. In that way, I always leap at the opportunity to write things like recommendation letters. And because I tend to write so personally, perhaps I might be an essayist. Sometimes I dream about writing those and short stories (I wrote a few decent ones in class, anyway) and maybe finding a better knack for drawing strip cartoons, which I've done as a persistent hobby. But dreams are futile and irritating without the products of effort. This is especially true for producing essays and short stories, isn't it? This semester I intend to create more such projects and finish them. Maybe I'm writing something worth reading, or I ought to make it so. But I'm still terribly fearful.
Who are 2 favorite non-fiction authors?
Ted Conover was the first non-fiction author I very deeply respected. He is a kind of investigative journalist who inhabits exclusive societies that he chooses for his writing. He wrote Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Illegal Immigrants as a migrant worker, and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, as a corrections officer. I was struck by how courageous he was to become part of others' difficult, difficult worlds and how empathetic he was to their lives, which he proved through his writing and through his breadth of research on the subject. I read those two books in high school and I will never forget them. Perhaps it's funny that I will remember each book more for the presentation of the content more than the content itself.
For similar reasons I have lately highly esteemed Joan Didion. She too wrote about specific societies with her own empathetic commentary. In comparison to Ted Conover she wrote from a little more distance and with a little more of her own angst. She wrote mostly about lives of socialites and street rogues in California with a sense of universal human strife. Some of her lines are going to haunt me:
"It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home." ~"On Self Respect"
I suppose I simply want to learn how to navigate through that world. I felt overwhelmed just to hear the title of the course, and now I am terribly overwhelmed with the thought of diving into this Internet infinity in my sense of insignificance. Perhaps my path is narrowed to this: I want to know how to contact and how to work for places that would hire and network with writers, and how writers begin working for such places. Honestly, I feel rather aimless, but maybe I would write for work if I were only given directions.
What kind of writing would you like to do?
I have yet to prove myself as a writer, and I have not been working hard enough to attain the status. Honestly, I became involved with English writing simply because I received generally good feedback in different English classes. Professor Jen Lee said that my strength might be in essay writing. People have said that I write very carefully, and that I tend to write with personal introspection, angst, and to reach a few good and succinctly written flashes of insight. My assignments were simply "well written." I don't mean to boast. Actually, I tell English professors that I write "because I suck at everything else," and even with their encouragement, my goals in writing were ill-defined. Simply put, I write carefully because I care about what I'm researching and what I'm feeling. I write carefully because I'm respectful and terribly fearful.
Throughout school, I tended to write about foreign cultures and about feeling isolated - so I suppose that I like to write about aliens and feeling alienated. These are my themes. But I also like to believe that I'm writing on someone else's behalf - to care about someone else's alienation. In that way, I always leap at the opportunity to write things like recommendation letters. And because I tend to write so personally, perhaps I might be an essayist. Sometimes I dream about writing those and short stories (I wrote a few decent ones in class, anyway) and maybe finding a better knack for drawing strip cartoons, which I've done as a persistent hobby. But dreams are futile and irritating without the products of effort. This is especially true for producing essays and short stories, isn't it? This semester I intend to create more such projects and finish them. Maybe I'm writing something worth reading, or I ought to make it so. But I'm still terribly fearful.
Who are 2 favorite non-fiction authors?
Ted Conover was the first non-fiction author I very deeply respected. He is a kind of investigative journalist who inhabits exclusive societies that he chooses for his writing. He wrote Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Illegal Immigrants as a migrant worker, and Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, as a corrections officer. I was struck by how courageous he was to become part of others' difficult, difficult worlds and how empathetic he was to their lives, which he proved through his writing and through his breadth of research on the subject. I read those two books in high school and I will never forget them. Perhaps it's funny that I will remember each book more for the presentation of the content more than the content itself.
For similar reasons I have lately highly esteemed Joan Didion. She too wrote about specific societies with her own empathetic commentary. In comparison to Ted Conover she wrote from a little more distance and with a little more of her own angst. She wrote mostly about lives of socialites and street rogues in California with a sense of universal human strife. Some of her lines are going to haunt me:
"It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home." ~"On Self Respect"
Laura, this is terrific. Let's work on your fearfulness this year, and on finding your place within this world. You needn't feel intimidated by the class—we'll work with this material until we get it, so you should feel little pressure to perform, only to find your place/voice. I'm intrigued by your mention of the comic-strip drawings—you might think about using that talent as part of your story team's final multimedia work. What a terrific addition that would make.
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