Final Letter:

Dear Professor Rainford,                                                                                     7/14/12

I've never taken an online course before. Honestly when I initially attempted to navigate your class I was left completely bewildered. Not only was it confusing, but teaching myself techniques I've never used before and having minimal opportunities to ask you for help further perpetuated my confusion. None the less you were very helpful and patient. I feel like your assignments broke my brain open to a whole new realm of writing I didn't know I was capable of. I learned a lot! Thank you, so very much. I'm happy to say I now have an archive of work I am proud of. I love sharing my work with people who enjoy hearing it just as much as I enjoyed writing it. I am a million times more innovative with my writing than I ever was before. This course definitely challenged me and took what I can do with words to a whole new level. I am ecstatic with what I have accomplished in these seven weeks.

The assignment that involved writing at a distance was probably one of the most challenging of them all. I had never heard of writing at a distance, let alone applied it to anything I have written. I amazed myself when I watched the transformation of my expanding pieces. Your writing at a distance assignment without a doubt did this for me. I never realized the infinite possibilities of saying the same thing in less or more words. The effect of using fewer words leaves a lot of ambiguous implications, an underlying sense of mystery that urges the viewer to read on. Where using more words allows you to get directly into the characters head, because everything is told directly to the viewer, leaving minimal aspects of the story open for interpretation. This assignment definitely helped me develop a vast array of writing styles that I wasn’t aware existed. Learning how to write at a distance has given me the freedom to decide confidently whether I want to make my narratives mysterious or in contrast, explicitly forthright.

Another challenge was fiction writing as a whole. I am a journalism major and it is a piece of cake for me to do research, take a stance, find proof within my research, and compose everything into an essay. In contrast, formulating a completely foreign piece of work solely from my imagination definitely took additional digging and thinking I’d never done before. In that regard I stopped trying to make up completely foreign characters, and instead chose to use people I know. The people I chose to use in my pieces of work are far from ordinary. I figured they entertain me, why wouldn’t they entertain you? Not only did I use actual people, but I expanded on their stories and their wackiness. I changed all of their names in hopes of protecting them from reading anything they may find offensive. For my sci-fi short story entitled, “Don’t Play with Fire or You Will Get Burned,” I actually used elements of my life to bring the story to life. I kept driving past mass amounts of road kill and it saddened me. I wish I could do something about it. Not only that, but I too see a lot of dead foxes on the side of the road that resemble my Pomeranian Axel Rose.  I learned to start with the root of something I know and nourish that root with my imagination to blossom into an exotic tree.

I went into this class all knowing my love for poetry, but aspiring to improve my poetry. Instead, I found there is a lot more to creative writing than poetry. There are short stories, plays, prose’, distances of writing and so on. I came out of this class feeling like a better-rounded writer. I feel I can write anything now the sky is the limit! My writing skills are beyond informative, but universal! I can’t honestly say I’ve never enjoyed reading a text book, but the texts you assigned were fortunately the first. Being a broke college student I have always sold my text books for pocket change, but I’m looking forward to holding onto these ones and adding to my memorable collection of work.

 

Sincerely,

Gabrielle Johnson