The Writing Experience
Foolish Forest Fun reflection

I was not very sure of what I wanted to write about when I was first assigned the ISP. I found myself entertaining a myriad of ideas: war, famine, social issues. I did not have any direction. A cloud of ideas swirled around me, just out of reach. In the end, I ended up picking a topic that I felt I understood fairly well: nature.

Writing the expressive was fairly easy. My life was and is surrounded with nature and animals. Growing up, I had always had at least three animals all jammed into my house at one time. In order to write my expressive, I just needed to recount one of the many times I interacted with nature.

My first edit was done over google docs. Steven told me he liked how my piece focused on dialogue, but he told me to expand some scenes. Ms. Skawski concurred with Steven about expanding on a couple of the scenes. I had added a final paragraph that explained my views instead of showing my views in the fabric of the story.

Throughout the process of fixing my piece,I took out an entire part about a photograph of my sister, my brother and I. The scene about my sister’s photograph connected to my beginning, but I could not make it fit and sound right. In addition to removing the photograph scene, I also connected my ending back to the beginning by mentioning frog catching. I think I am going to take a conservationist stance on nature in my affirmative piece.

I learned that I could write a paper that is mostly dialogue. Instead of describing scenes, I could use the voices and attitudes of different people to establish scenes. Not only can I establish scenes with dialogue, but I can describe entire lifetimes of interactions between people through a single spoken line.

This paper reminded me how much nature actually played a role in my development as a person. If I wanted to do something, I would go outside and play mindless games for hours. While writing this paper, I found myself comparing my electronics-filled life to the life I described in my essay. Maybe I will reunite with nature in college.