My Reflection

What’s changed? I started this semester not knowing what I was getting myself into. I used to write so much, because writing would excite me. I thought taking creative writing would reinstate my love for writing, and it did. I have realized that I have a lot to learn about writing still, and that I have some pretty strong weaknesses to work on. When I got grades back on some of my pieces I was surprised by how bad I was doing. I continued to put all my effort forth in order to prove to myself that I could do it. In my revision process I worked hard at looking at what others said about my work, and ways famous poets wrote, so I could try to find a way to make my writing better. I especially like reading Langston Hughes, and Edgar Allan Poe

To write the piece I had to think back to the sixteen years I spent with her, up until the day I watched her die. She was my main inspiration. In one of the quizzes from the semester, we were asked to write a character bank. I used this character bank idea to think about all the things about my grandma that I could include in this poem. Another thing I used to change the poem was look at the rubric. The rubric for the poem said that my opening line of the poem wasn’t really an attention getter. To change this, I changed the poems opening line from, “I woke up today,” to “You didn’t wake up today.” This serves as more of an attention getter because the reader will wonder who didn’t wake up, rather than their uncaring thoughts about my personal wake up. The rubric also suggested that I use more senses, so I added more on the site of viewing my grandma’s hands, and her rings. In my third piece, Everything is fine, I had taken influence from a Langston Hughes poem. When I revised I realized I needed to make the ideal more my own, and so the poem completely changed. I kept my theme of everything not being fine, but I made changes for the better. The rubric said that I need to work on making the experience come to life, so I changed the poem so that it reflects more the true feeling. The poem turned into more of a story about it being fine, rather than its smashed together original