Fiction. An entirely new world for the freshman. Of course, we have all written it before, but it wasn’t fiction like this. Now there are workshops, revisions, and discussions. Almost every day we read and analyze short stories. I am starting to understand the complications and craft of creating a good short story, and it is extremely hard! You need to remember to have a solid plot,  to distinguish narrator and character diction, give character backstory through showing, not telling. It all leaves lots of room for mistakes, but it is incredibly worth it. All stories I encounter, through books or movies or something else, have a higher criteria to meet. Books I loved before this unit I now hate, because I can identify problems in them that I never saw before. Because of this, I am afraid to read books or watch movies from my childhood, for fear of ruining them. I nearly died watching The Princess and the Frog because there were so many plot holes. But when a story is good, I can appreciate it much more, because I know what goes into it.

It was hard to transition into fiction, because we had been doing a poetry unit just before. That poetry unit (the first unit of the year) was the only training and information I had ever had for anything to do with creative writing. My brain had taken in those lessons and stuck itself in a poetry mindset, because that was the only thing I knew. The earliest thing you learn in poetry is to identify and omit unnecessary words, and to realize the weight of your words, since there are so few of them in poetry. So when we started fiction, I was lost because there were more words and more to say; the weight of each words lessoned a little bit. And from that lessoned weight came all these unnecessary words, because I was focusing more on the story than on how you told it.

I like fiction, because it puts everything into a different light. I am excited to see the fiction writer I will become, and I am excited for the short stories waiting for me in the next Creative Writing class.

Lauren Ainslie, class of 2021