My Goals

1.      I want to improve my writing and sentence structure.   I feel my current abilities are hindered by a weak structure and thus my writings suffer.

As far as my first listed goal, I have to say that my sentence structure has greatly improved from my initial beginnings.  Throughout the semester, I found that a lot of the structure issues I had have very simple rules to remember.  Over the semester, my drafts have seen fewer standard errors as I progressed.  I would have to say that I succeeded in the goal of structure improvement.

 

2.      I want to be able to write to entertain.  I see myself as a story teller.  I want and need to improve my ability to properly present my point.  And to present it in a way that the reader finds entertaining.  I want to learn the techniques to “grab” the reader’s attention.

This is one goal that I held higher than most of my goals.  The ability to be a good story-teller has been a desire of mine for a long time.  My biggest fault was my tendency to ramble on a bit too much.  This was evident in some of my earlier drafts regarding “Thirteen states, six days.”  I would go on and on, sometimes repeating myself.  As I have progressed through the semester, I believe I am starting to get a handle on this.  As the personal essay progressed, I began almost not telling enough.  Unfortunately, I corrected the problem by going overboard.  However, I feel that after going through the revisions, I was able to find what was necessary in the tale, and what was not.  Overall, I have to focus on the details and that will help me continue to improve.

 

3.      I want to be able to preserve my memories.  They say a picture is worth 1000 words.  I need to learn just which words are the right 1000 to paint the picture I want to paint.

Memories are the major factors in my desire to write.  As I get older, some of the details of my many adventures have started to fade.  Given the right triggers, my mind can recall even the smells, but even those have started to fade.  Aside from just rambling on as described above, I also had an issue choosing the right words the properly convey not only the images that I imagine, but also the emotion and feeling of adventure that my tales typically involve.  I cannot say that I have fully succeeded at this goal but I have made progress.  I realize that I have do need to work slightly on this.  I feel this is most evident throughout my essay “Thirteen states, six days.”  There are moments where I feel the reader can sit back, close their eyes, and see exactly what I saw in their minds, such as the glow-stick war.  In the end, I find that I have been able to gather about 800 of those thousand words to paint a good picture.  Now I need find the other 200 words and when that happens, I believe my writing will be exponentially more entertaining and intriguing.

 

4.      I want to write freely and learn how to keep the critical suppressed until the first pass of the creative is complete.  I find myself judging before I complete and then I never complete it.

This goal has to be my most successful achievement this semester when considering my five intended improvements.  I say this because, until now, I have never finished a “memoir.”  I would always get about halfway through, start looking at what I wrote, and finding that I did not like them.  That was the biggest road-block that I encountered.  I use the past-tense format simply to express the fact that I have actually formed more than one complete tale over the last three months.  These are stories that I have always told but never put on paper.  For example, I refer to my profile essay about my friend Geno Ortiz.  He is a very talented musician and a great friend that I am happy to have met and still speak to on occasion.  For me, doing a profile on him was a way for me to show others just how good of a guy he was, musically and in friendship.  I remember the story of the runaway Winnebago to this day and still feel as if he is telling it to me in my head.  Even though I have other valuable memories that are on the pages of the web-site, this is a tale I wanted to tell, mostly because it was not about me.  This story was about a person I admire.  In the end, that means slightly more to me than my own stories.

 

 

5.      I want to gain true writing discipline.

This goals result is a little bit harder for me to determine success of failure throughout the semester, simply because this item is harder to remain impartial on.  In my opinion, I have greatly increased my ability to not only put a story together, but to also put it in a format that is technically sound.  I honestly hope that is evident through my evaluations of my own writings.  However, like I said, I find it tough to be impartial on my results.  I feel that any writer has to always strive for true discipline, no matter what they have already written.  If you do not continue to try to improve, you will never write something better than your last piece.  However, through continuously striving towards improvement, you never know just how high you can rise.  I hope to follow my own advice, and you never know, you may see my name on a dust jacket someday.