My Writing Analysis

When you understand the reasoning’s for a character's thoughts, feelings and actions, it is helping you better adapt with yourself and anyone else you come to contact with. People learn a certain skill or trade when getting a career, but communication and empathy skills apply to any real life advancement and cannot be taught. Through reading fiction you are not only able to understand characters motives and hidden messages, you are also able to associate and link real life memories or events to a story. Being able to find similarities and common meaning between two things that would normally not correlate is a very important life skill. Many things happen in life and they are all different, but they have a familiar feel to them because you are able to use your knowledge from past experiences to help you

“When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books”, said Alaska Young in the book Looking for Alaska, no I don’t personally have a room filled with books but I sure do love them. The thing I find amazing about books is how they can change how you view things in life, or how they can make you discover a possible career for your future but sometimes they can make you do negative things. For me a couple of books have done this and it has almost been life changing. By life changing I mean it has changed some of my views on life and one even helped me find the career that I am planning on having in the future. There are two books in particular that really influenced some of my choices over the past couple years. Some in very positive good ways and one not in the best way. The first one is by John Green and no it’s not his more famous book The Fault in our Stars. It’s his less known book Looking for Alaska. The other book that helped me discover the career I would love to go into is a book that I first read back in seventh grade call Perfect by Natasha Friend. Which reading also lead to one bad thing though. So I’ll be telling how each of these books have changed some of my views on life and how one of them helped me figure out the career I’d like to go into.

Throughout the essay “Our secret” by Susan Griffin, Griffin talks about a few characters’ fears, secrets and she gives us insights into these “secrets”. Griffin comes to realize her own secrets and fears by examining others. She relates to a few of the characters such as Himmler, Leo, Helene and everyone else even though she is different than all of them. The only thing that all of these characters have in common is that they all represent human emotion. Susan Griffin reveals that everyone has a hidden side to them and anything being showed on the outside could be fake or a false representation of themselves. “I think of it now as a kind of mask, not an animated mask that expresses the essence of an inner truth, but a mask that falls like dead weight over the human face.” (Griffin 237) This quote explains what she means about secrets being the barrier to others’ feelings and having this mask hides what you really feel on the inside.

As a product of South Central Los Angeles the expectations bestowed upon me were less than remarkable. I grew up in a system of public schools where textbooks and classrooms where infested with graffiti and marker lines by students with no intention to learn. As a child growing up this kind of environment I did what I saw around me. Ignored my education and focused on making friends. Both my parents worked full time jobs so time spent with them was limited, I never cared much for reading or writing as a child, books where never a gift; more of a chore that was taking up time from my true interested. It was by these guidelines that I never saw the true magic behind literature until now a grown up.

I transformed my academic efforts and made a concerted effort to read more, enrolled in a CUNY public speaking class for college credit, trained as a tutor, won a spot in the Yale Daily News Journalism class which resulted in an independent online newspaper’s offer to be a freelance European sports writer.

The details of a story’s plot can reveal the thoughts, questions, and emotions of an author's work and is essential to creating an authentic experience for the reader. “Those of us who are serious readers or writers are apt to share a certain guilty feeling about reading an engrossing novel if indeed we can find one.” Diane Johnson Firstly, the tone which is the way the author expresses his/her perspective and is fundamental to a successful plot often reveals the author’s emotions. Things that enhance the tone in writing are imagery, vivid descriptions and lively context. These elements can determine whether the reader will experience, fear, anxiety or suspense, etc., Secondly, strong, dramatic, realist and meaningful vocabulary is crucial

Each of my characters are different in terms of personalities and each look at a different avenue for a problem. As a writer, this is the time I can step outside to get an overall view of the exprience and still see it thorugh my characters eyes. I need to see what they are seeing, feel what they are feeling and really understand not just what is happening, but why.

So I began taking recommendations from peers I respected and read works from writers I had met. Raymond Carver, Junot Díaz, Colum McCann, Anne Lamott, Sherman Alexi, Dorothea Brande, George Saunders and Lance Olsen are a handful of the writers I discovered. All have affected my own writing, but after reading many works from Carver, McCann and Díaz, I mostly saw the valued change they provided for my craft.

One of the keys to my success in anything I do is my ability to find positive things in things that most people see as a negative. Sickness forces me to stop my exercise program? That’s a welcome rest. Tired of my job? That’s a time to rediscover what’s important and to look for a better job. Super typhoon ruined all my possessions? This allowed me to realize that my stuff wasn’t important, and to be thankful that my loved ones were still alive and safe. You can do the same thing with criticism: find the positive in it. Sure, it may be rude and mean, but in most criticism, you can find a nugget of gold: honest feedback and a suggestion for improvement. For example, this criticism: “You write about the same things over and over and your posts

Nowadays, I am still a reading lover and writes from time to time, I really appreciate I had a boring childhood to let me read extensively and developed my minds from all the masterpieces. When I recall the nights of reading books in the dormitory of the boarding school, I still feel warm and sweet. Because I know regardless how long the night is, there is a book which would accompany me as

John Green, one of my biggest role-models, once said, “Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.” Nostalgia means something you long for, I long for a bright future. In my future, I desire to be an author. In order to accomplish that, I must thoughtfully construct a plan that will lead me to the ultimate result of the life that I crave for. Authors influenced me to want to become an author myself. After reading a wide range of books by varying writers like Ned Vizzini, J.D Salinger, Natalie Babbit, Mitch Albom, and as I said earlier, John Green, I am determined to leave that evangelical zeal that you get from books, and only books, on my readers the way many books have done to me before. Establishing goals is crucial to actualizing my dreams of having a gratifying career as a Young Adult/Teen novelist.

Moving on, finishing this book was pretty monumental to me because not only was I a book closer to finishing my favorite series, but I was also finding out just how much more I would love to be a writer. I know, totally out of this world. I had never heard of a family member of mines who loved to write, and if I had to choose a particular calling for most of us, I’d probably say it was singing. Not that I hate singing, hitting the right note is always a satisfying experience, but there is nothing else in this world that I have known to be more placating and natural to me than reading a book or writing a new story.

For the longest time in my life, I felt that I belonged to the world of the arts. Not only was I able to lose myself in my sketches, but I was able to find comfort within museum walls. The various paintings and statues in my company spoke to me not verbally, but emotionally. Amongst all the paint, charcoal and marble, I felt like I truly belonged. However, I am well aware of the risks that come with this passion and, in no position to take any risks, I had to come to a hard decision. After much consideration (with a small side of procrastination), I have elected to thrust myself into the world of literature in hopes that one day, I may work at a publishing company as a book editor. This desire of mine stems from my fondness for reading and my admiration of the skill writers such as Shel Silverstein, George Orwell, and Harper Lee possess. My love of reading goes beyond well-known novels and childhood favorites, as I oftentimes find hidden gems within the deep crevices of the internet. Although not considered as respectable in comparison to the more mainstream titles, I can’t help but admire them. These particular works have absolutely no reason to be as good as they are, but they overcome

When I first realized I would be taking a class where I would analyze texts from all around the world I was excited. I had never paid attention to the origin of writer’s, because until that point most all of my readings were based in the United States of America, or from American authors. I do not feel that all the books we read as a class left me with greater knowledge or a different outlook on the world but some did. I will never forget reading A Tale For The Time Being because it changed me. Reading a coming of age story about suicide, family issues and cosmic intervention opened up my mind. It was my first time reading and needing to put a book down to further process what I had read. I recalled the questions from Humanities I: Who am I? What is my place? What does it mean to be human?, and most importantly How then shall I live? I found similarities between myself and Nao which made me uncomfortable. She had no clear answer for any of the above questions, and neither do I.

I was making my daily trip to the library. But today was different and I could sense it from the start. Usually I go into the section titled Young Adults but today I went to the Mystery section. On an ordinary day, I usually am very fastidious about my books. Today marked a new day, a new day when I would start to expand the genres I read. I pranced throughout the pervasive bookshelves looking at the Nancy Drew books which have received great notoriety but none of them seemed to catch my eye. I thought to myself "I want to read something different! Some sort of phenomena!" Having been interested by the books, I lost track of time. Somehow I managed to miss the announcement saying "Everyone evacuate the