How I Write?

                When I was little, I had a dream about a mountain that divided two lands. One was a vast sandy desert with tall rocky cliffs and bluffs of red stone. The other was a forest of redwoods, slipping down the rocky slopes towards a vast bay riddled with grottos and locks, with hidden depths and white sandy beaches. A road curved among the trees, and I and my gypsy family rushed along it in our wagon, chased by an angry mob. They were angry because they were plagued by a witch, and when we tried to save an innocent woman from their wrath, they threw all of us out of their town.

                Deep into the forest we followed the trail, closer to the shoulders of the mountains, until around a bend and below the roots of a tree, the sounds of pursuit growing closer, we found a hidden doorway just large enough to let us pass through the mountains. We walked through, bright torches illuminated Egyptian hieroglyphs all along the long straight tunnel through the mountain. Finally we reached the other side, but the desert was vast and unwelcoming to travelers like us, and we had to turn back.

                It was while we were trekking our way back through the mountain that we discovered to our horror we had brought the witch with us. I shouted at the others to keep going, but the witch tackled me, her fetid flesh and rasping claws filling my vision, her weight pressing on top of me like a vice.

                That is one of my favorite dreams and one of my absolute worst, most horrifying nightmares. For days after I wrote pages of stories about the dream. I drew maps of the places I had seen in my mind’s eye, developed the characters I had envisioned, a storyline, and a destination. Slowly the nightmarish aspect was submerged, hidden by fairy children and dragons and dwarves. I created an entire world around that dream, and over a dozen stories to take place in it. Hundreds of characters made their way into that world, but the witch is not one of them.

                That is how I write. Something gnaws at me deep in the night and I wake up fever-slick with fear or worry or guilt, and I write about it. I develop characters that stand in my place, and backstories for them. I develop magic systems to give them power, draw maps and describe the places they go and the people they visit. I once spent two summers detailing a map with hundreds of cities and dozens of kingdoms, all connected to that one dream of a beautiful country and a woman raping me. I buried the nightmare in layer upon layer of adventure and fairytale fluff.

                That’s not how I write. My dreams are beautiful things, of flying above light posts, of fighting dragons and cities of light in the darkness. I write reams about customs, and research customs, and research tribal systems and write about tribal systems. I love fantasy, but most of the time writing fantasy I was trying to hide some secret that worried at me in the middle of the night.

                A lot of what I write is background information. I have a hard time making my characters go through horrible circumstances, probably because I like them too much. I give them harrowing, sometimes incredibly horrible backgrounds, but that is in the past, and they’ve gone through and survived that. As a result, my plots are fairly weak, and I haven’t finished any books beyond a couple dozen pages.

                I write alone, and quietly. I’m too easily distracted by friends, or Facebook, or sometimes even catchy music. I write late at night, and in the early morning, and when I’m trying to avoid other things, and when the thoughts and ideas crowd my head so much I can’t think of anything else.

                Sometimes I would wonder if others could see the darkness hiding behind my empty words. Do you see the vacant smiles? I wonder in my head. What do you think when you read about how each person ends up with someone, about worlds where disease is nonexistent and people live in sterile space and dream of the life on dusty Mars? What do you think when you see the picture of the boy running with a unicorn? Or the way I draw eyes without pupils, vacant and beautiful and plastic. What do you see in that?

                I read once about how to build excellent characters. You take all you remember, like the Giver distilling memories, and push it out of your palms and fingers and into the paper. You write about the good memories, but in a much more important way you write about the bad memories too. Of course you can disguise them, you should disguise them, because you don’t want your naked soul on the page for every vagrant reader to gobble with his hungry eyes. But you write your pain and intimacy into your characters, and that is what gives them life. 

15 Minute Writing Prompts

Part A- Timed Writing Prompts

1. People often belong to multiple groups; for example, the same person is a member of a family which itself is a unit in the larger community. People can be grouped by age, language, nationality, culture, skin color, sports team, favorite pastime, fan affiliation, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity, religion or lack thereof, and even height or physical fitness. People will often define their identities in relation to the groups they belong to. 

-Identify two groups to which you belong. How does belonging to each group affect your identity? How do these two group-identities interact with each other? Include specific instances where your membership in each group affected your life personally. 

2. "A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble." --Mahatma Ghandi

 What does this sentence mean to you? Describe a personal experience in which your convictions were tested. Why was it important to you? How did the experience affect you? Discuss how the quote by Ghandi relates to your experience, and be ready to share with the class. 

3. Throughout history, many cultures and peoples have been oppressed. Romans conquered their neighbors, European Colonialists established themselves of nations far beyond their native shores, Jews were persecuted throughout their history but most poignantly during the Holocaust, Africans were enslaved and stolen far from their homelands, dictatorships in various countries foster a culture of fear, and in the United States people who are "not like us" are derided and not given the same rights and privileges. 

Describe a moment within the past month where you felt you or someone else was treated unfairly. It could be through bullying, favoritism, neglect, restrictions, or any other way you felt someone was not treated equal. How did that experience make you feel? Describe how you think that experience relates to oppression on a broader scale. In what other ways have you seen people being oppressed?

Part B- Do the 15 Minute Writing Prompt

1. The goal of junior and senior high school students is a high school diploma. No matter what interests and skills you have, your focus should be earning your diploma.

    Why is a high school diploma important? Write an essay in which you explain your point of view. Use specific examples, reasons, and details to develop and support your point of view. 

    Focusing on a high school diploma is important because without a diploma many doors or shut to you. Even with a GED, getting into a college is harder. Many jobs require a high school diploma for even entry level positions. The sense of accomplishment one gets from graduating and holding a diploma sums up all of the accomplishments one has had throughout their school experience. People are less likely to commit felonies if they've graduated. Finally, graduating sets a certain standard for future generations. Your children will have a higher expectations for themselves and for you if you've graduated. 

   Getting into college is almost impossible without either a GED or a high school diploma. Although not impossible, many institutions of higher learning do not accept individuals without one or the other; most set even higher standards, requiring specific GPA's or SAT/ ACT scores before admittance, at a bare minimum. People who have some college on average make 20,000 more dollars a year than those who do not, and that opportunity is closed to you if you do not graduate. That numbers doubles again for those who graduate from college. 

   In addition, almost all jobs require at least a high school diploma in order to accept even entry level positions. Getting a job that allows for growth, better paychecks, and a modicum of wealth requires the high school diploma as it's most basic requirement. Many life ambitions and aspirations will not be fulfilled without this important document. 

   Graduation is an accomplishment, the accumulation of 12+ years of education. Twelve years is an incredible amount of time and effort to put forth towards a singular goal, and means nothing to the larger world without that all-important piece of paper. The record of your achievement demonstrates to your society and to yourself that you are ready to tackle the larger tasks of an adult. -end 15 minutes

I chose a writing prompt that was more difficult for me intentionally because I know that many times my students will be faced with writing prompts and feel like they can't write or don't have anything to write about. In this case, I started off on a few false starts before tackling the actual question. I feel that it's alright for my students to take off on their own ideas, as long as they are writing. Getting them to focus on the specific thesis can be the focus of other assignments, but I feel that timed writing works best when the students put their pen to paper and just continually let the words flow out. Getting rid of the writing blocks and getting the students' creative juices flowing seems like the primary purpose of exercises like this. I noticed when I was writing I did allot of self editing, and I also asked for help from the people around me. As I did so, I thought that it might be a good idea for students to feel that they could talk to their peers during such an assignment, so that writing became something they could discuss. I struggled allot on this assignment. I couldn't concentrate and I had to read the directions several times before I actual addressed the question. I think if my students saw how much I struggled on this assignment, they would feel more comfortable with their own struggles. My own expectations of how much they would write in 15 minutes certainly lowered. I doubt that I would expect my students to complete an entire essay in fifteen minutes, although an outline of one might certainly be doable.