Metacognition: Short Story

Writing a short story, as I've learned, is a difficult process, involving countless nuances, levels of depth, letting your mind run free, and of course- requiring enormous patience.

Such patience, as I see it, is immensely important to the quality of the story. I mean, first of all, it's just a good quality for a writer to have in general. Impatient writers tend to get frustrated very easily- and there's nothing worse than being a frustrated writer- grasping for words, counting minutes, deleting paragraphs, and struggling to get ahold of thoughts. Uggh. That's me, by the way. When I'm faced with things such as deadlines, external pressures, or distractions my writing, I naturally become frustrated. It's unfortunate, however, since this frustration overrides all means of creativity and jams the writing process.

So the question I asked myself during this assignment was how to overcome such frustration, and truthfully, my answer differed several times. The initial response was to drop the writing and do something else (even if i had just started a paragraph).

So i did that, of course, and yet I found this situation even more problematic because it served only as a distraction- not necessarily a mind-clearing tactic. Just a tool for procrastinating. I mean, really- once I was sitting in front of the TV eating a juicy popsicle, I'd simply begin to dread going back to work. I'd put it off some more- and as we all know, that's a terrible work habit.

The alternative method- which simply meant digging in for several hours on end- seemed harsh at first, but I wound up doing it anyway as the project's deadline neared. It was productive, sure, but still- after 4 hours of solid writing, my mind had worn itself down to a pulp. My brain would simply stop working. I would become flustered. I'd rewrite the same paragraph over and over again, and my writing was crappy.

So, you might ask how I dealt with this? The answer: I didn't! And for that reason, my story sucks.

But no, really. One thing I realized is that a writer must do everything NOT to get frustrated- and this is a difficult thing to do. It's easy to be frustrated with the assignment- So therefore, what i found is that one should NOT THINK of the assignment. One should think of the characters. The plotline. The imagery. All of the story's elements. In fact, one should become immersed in them. This is where the phrase, "Putting yourself in the character's shoes" rings a bell, but unfortunately, this is much easier said than done.

Metacognition: The Jane Eyre Dialogue

My thought process for writing the Jane Eyre dialogue involved several key elements. Some of these initial elements included procrastinating, loathing, brainstorming, briefly thinking,-"Oh, this isn't so bad", more brainstorming, more procrastinating, trying not to think about all the endless work i'd have to do, and then panicking once I realized it was Wednesday afternoon and the dialogue was less than 10% complete.

The dialogue itself was about defying the status quo, and like any other writing assingment, it began with the brainstorming: writing down each idea as it came into my head. "St. John's power over Jane", "Jane's concept of marriage", "Marriage on the basis of love", and so on. So I typed each idea onto google docs, called Kate, and asked her to see what she thought of them. She thought they were fine (if not great).

But instead of jumping into the dialogue like I'm sure most other people did after the brainstorming, Kate and i actually posted some of our opinions beforehand. This would help fill in any missing information, clarify certain notions, make sure we're on the same page, add detail to our ideas, and narrow down the discussion topic.

So in any case, that WAS a good start, but after that, things got tougher. Our schedules tightened up, both of us were away for the weekend, other assignments were thrown at us, and a huge miscommunication on Wednesday turned the whole thing into a last-minute nightmare.

With luck, however, we were able to write things out fairly easily. The format of the paper as an open-ended discussion made the writing very smooth and easy-going. Smooth and easy-going, that is, as long as I knew what I was talking about. And better yet, since we typed in tandem, it was almost as if we were actually having the discussion!!