Third Semester Takeaways

  • Drafting means printing out a story, marking it up and rewriting it. The ‘artistic’ process takes root in the reinscription.
  • The above makes writing seem even more excruciating a process.
  • Publishing fiction seems as daunting and frustrating an obstacle as certain other adolescent yes/no binaries were in high school. No doubt in retrospect the angst surrounding it will seem just as wasteful and silly.
  • Solutions to any prose problem can be found in other texts.
  • Reading is as much a process and a ‘search’ as writing is. Output can only be as good as input.
  • One may ignore the mandates of others within ones text, including the MSWord grammar check.
  • James Wood is probably right about free-indirect.
  • Critiquing work properly involves re-re-reading and marking up (i.e. similar to the drafting process).