Kara Peterson

I know for the other's I sort of wrote my own description of their story process and all of that, but with Kara I got a much different answer to "what was your inspiration". I was given a very long and very insightful paragraph that described her reasons for writing her novel "A Different Kind". When asked "What was your inspiration?", Kara provided me with this answer....

"I was first inspired to write this story in my junior year of high school. I was sitting in my Forensic Science class and we were learning about the bruising patterns caused during a car accident. We discussed how the car would pull the weight of its passengers in certain directions and an idea came into my head. I began writing a car crash scene soon after, which set up the basic foundation of my story. It has evolved and changed in the 5 years since I began, and has evolved more into a story about fitting into the kinds of molds we set for ourselves and other people, and the pressure we feel to fit into them. I also was inspired by John Green’s (author of Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, The Fault in our stars) writing. In interviews and online forums, he has discussed his perspective on YA writing and the male obsession with the “manic pixie girl,” as he referrers to the crazy dream girl of most male geared fiction. I wanted to write a story that wasn’t centered on a love story per-se. I wanted to write something that battled the “boy obsessed,” creepy stalker vibe books, like Twilight, promote. I wanted to write a strong female character that is just an everyday kind of person.

As Kara said everything I would have needed too, I have pasted her work below. The writing speaks for itself in comparison to the inspiration and story behind it."

The main character, Aubrey, is at a party, getting very inebriated. She enters a bathroom, after an encounter with a boy, Mark whom she finds repulsive.

***

A knock on the door made me jump. The knob turned and Mark poked his head in. He smiled and slithered into the room, his size taking up much of whatever space remained in the bathroom. He closed the door behind him and I made my way back over to the toilet. The bathtub was right next to it so I opted to sit on the floor, with my back against the side of the tub. Mark came and sat down across from me. He picked up the bottle from the floor, unscrewed the cap and took a swig. He passed the bottle to me and I looked at it for a moment before taking a long sip, letting go of any reservations I had been having in the short time since he entered the room. 

We passed the bottle back and forth a few more times before I felt my head get heavy and I slumped closer to the floor. Eventually Mark was leaning over me, inches from my face. He began to kiss me and, at first, I began to pull back. He looked me in the eye as I took the final pull from the bottle before letting it slip from my hand and he leaned in again to kiss me. This time I let him and began kissing him back as I slid to the floor, his weight shifting above me. I ignored the little part of my brain that was still working, which blanched at the thought of his lips on mine, as I felt his weight push on top of me. I turned my head, breaking the kiss, trying to catch my breath so I could think clearly. 

Stop, my thoughts screaming the word that my mouth was unable to form; a small moan of disapproval was all I could muster, as his mouth found my neck. I felt his hand slide up my bare side and under my shirt. His hand was cold and I gasped. My hands found his chest and I pushed as hard as I could, my arms feeling as if they were no longer attached, my muscles felt like Jell-O.  My heart was pounding and I tried to squirm out from beneath him, but he was too heavy, too strong, and I had no control over my limbs, which seemed to be working on a delay.

Suddenly his hand was on the button of my jean shorts when the door to the bathroom burst open. In the doorway stood a boy, with brown hair, in a black t-shirt. Mark stopped kissing me and looked at the boy, who was just staring, this odd sadness in his eyes. I wondered briefly if that was how my eyes looked to other people. Almost desperate, like he’d been betrayed; like a dog who’d been kicked as a puppy, who couldn’t believe someone could be so cruel.

"Can I help you with something, buddy?" Mark said, as he rolled off me slightly to get a better look at the boy in the doorway. I took a deep breath, gasping for air now that I had been relieved of his weight. Behind him I saw the couple from earlier, the red-headed girl and the boy with dark hair. The boy in the doorway said nothing as he turned to look at Mark. I felt a tension in the air and I got a pang in my stomach. My heart pounded in my ears and I tried to focus on the other people in the small room as it swayed and spun around me. I looked from Mark to the boy, wondering if they were just going to stare at each other forever when suddenly Mark got up and left the room. 

The boy turned from me and walked down the hallway while the red-head and her boyfriend stared after him. I let my head fall back to the ground as the tension slipped away. I don't know how long I laid there, but the red head eventually entered the room and pulled me to my feet. She put my arm around her shoulder and guided me back to the hall. When we reached him, the dark haired boy put my other arm around him and they brought me through the house and out to the front yard. We approached a black SUV that had the engine running. The boy chuckled as he spoke: 

"You'd better do it here ‘cause I will never forgive you if you do it in my truck." 

I barely had time to question what he meant before I turned my head, and puked in the bushes.

Christina Delloso

Now, out of the three, Christina is by far the most unique. she's also one who I don't know if you'd consider what she did fiction. At least not for the purposes of this class. Instead of writing a children's book or a novel, as the other two mentioned here are, Christina took her love for writing and storytelling and her love for animation and put them together to create her animated short: “Take Out The Trash”. The short is about a boy who is told by his mother to take the trash out on a winter day. Instead, he decides to try and make his dog take out the trash for him. The short is cute, however, due to the fact that it is currently being graded as a school project, I could not get a link to the actual short. Christina was able to get me a few stills however, and they are below. If at any point I can get access to the film, i'll be sure to post it here!!

Preforming and Literary Arts Thesis Presentations

For class, we had to go to a reading of Fiction of some sort. I decided that I would go to the Honor's College Preforming and Literary Arts Thesis Presentations. For this track in the Honors Program, students get to write novels and short stories and poems and scripts that are at least 50 pages in length. This track is run by Dr. Phillip Cioffari, who is a published author, play wright, and screen writer. He is the professor that guides the student's work and mentors them throughout the writing process in hopes to have them finish, and publish, a work upon graduating.

The student's I chose to blog about are Ruti Frankel, Catherine Matteucci, Kara Peterson, and Christina Dellosso. I chose these four for two reasons...

1) I believe that their projects show creativity and the merits and beauty of fiction
2) These four are friends of mine who dedicated countless hours and passion to there projects and I feel      that each of their dedication to their writing is an example to be followed. Also, I know the story behind each story.

For the sake of length, each of the four will get their own blog, which will be linked below....

Catie Matteucci

Ruti Frankel

Christina Delloso

Kara Peterson

Catherine Matteucci:

Catherine "Catie" Matteucci decided to write a children's book titled "Charlie’s Nightmare" for her Honor's Thesis. When she was a little girl, her brother and her had a stuffed monkey and a stuffed tiger and used to write stories about their adventures. One such adventure revolved around the idea that when the two children slept, their stuffed animals went into their dreams and protected them. This is the story that Catie used to inspired her now published and soon to be sold on Amazon children's book.

Catie spent hours sitting in her room and in the studio sketching and drawing and, most importantly, taking a story that held the key to her childhood and getting it down on paper. Below is a sample page and illustration from Catie's work.

Ruti Frankel:

Ruti Frankel has always been interested in writing. It interested her beyond belief that stories could yield such emotions from readers and she yearned to make a story of her own one day. In high school she was  a writer, but had never found her story. she came up with ides and threw them around, but she didn't come up with the story that she felt she needed. When she found the William Paterson Honors College's Preforming and Literary Arts thesis program, she felt she found where she would get to that story. Yeah, it was a long road of not knowing and not having that story, but then one day she started writing and and "The Unveiling

" came out of the end of her pen (more likely her keyboard considering not many people still write by hand). 

"The Unveiling" is a story that Ruti says takes her love for fantasy and places she wishes she could visit and puts them to life. It is currently unfinished, but being worked on by Ruti and she can't wait to finish it. Below is a short excerpt. 

“I assure you, kind sir,” the drunk, having trouble keeping his eyes open, began in a slow whisper, causing Casmir to strain to hear, “no damage will transpire to your little tavern. You need not worry. This will be a clean fight that will last all of two minutes and will end with my challenger on the floor – by that very table. His faithful companions who offer service to help will ultimately fail, as all foolish enough to join will land hurt, if not unconscious. I will try my best to keep the blood at bay, but I do promise, nothing will break.

“So I now ask you, are you quite certain, sir, that you wish to not permit this inevitable fight to occur? Take note that your answer could lead to an unpleasant end for you, as well.”

Blog 8: On Revision

Revision. Dear lord, I hate the process of revision. I've just never liked taking something I felt was right, sitting down, and taking stuff out. Or changing things. Or looking for grammar and spelling errors. I'm also not very good at it, and a personal fault if mine is my hatred of things I'm not very good at. Math? I don't like it. Languages? Noooope. Revision? double nope.

despite this, I can understand why, especially this semester, it was so important. When writing a longer piece, it became necessary to revise. I would get so lost in the story and the process that i'd sometimes loose sight of things that were important. Going back, reading over, and changing things is necessary when writing a long story, any story really. This class helped me realize the importance of revision.

In terms of the actual process I use, it's a little unconventional. I read over it myself, change things and use the in class workshops as a guideline to lead the way, but on top of everything I use my roommate. My roommate, Rachael, is interested in one day becoming an editor. Because of that, we made an agreement that when I right, she reads it. She's the first one to see it and often she's the only one besides the teacher. She offers me grammar advice and even helps to fix the story a bit. She is probably my strongest revision technique. Without her, i'd be a mess of run on sentences.

Because i'm not the best at explaining revision, i decided to link two sites below to really help someone understand revision! One of them is a blog post on revision, the other is a blog devoted to it.

Revision Warriors

Essential Writing Skills: Editing and Revision

Blog 7: Writing & Workshopping versus Blogging & Publishing

~I Apologize Now Because This One Is Going To Be A Long One~

This blog has to be about the processes of writing and workshopping versus blogging and publishing. By this, I mean that I am going to contrast my semester's experiences of writing and helping others write through in class workshops and the process of writing this blog and posting work online.

Now, I'm a slightly different case than some of my classmates when it comes to the publishing side. I have had work posted online for a few years now on a website known as Figment. I have also had a writing blog where I take requests and write anything from short stories to fanfictions based on those requests. I haven't been very active on these sites since I started this scholastic year as my load has been very large. But I have always loved the art of blogging and/or publishing my work. For me, it is actually easier to get outside criticism from anyone and everyone on the internet than my peers in group workshops! There is just something so alluring about those little user icons giving me critiques!

In regards to the writing and workshopping side within the classroom and off the web, I personally love writing in script. I can't get enough of taking out a notebook and pen that will probably smear all over my knuckles and hand and just sitting there and writing. Especially over the summer! As a lifeguard of three years now, I find that over the summer I have a lot of time where I am cut off from technology and have nothing my imagination and a notebook or book to entertain me. This is when I get the most writing done. Or at least the most idea building. Over the semester I try and replicate this feel by leaving my phone and laptop behind and bringing a notebook with me whenever I am going to just sit by myself and collect my thoughts. Even just writing little one liners or thoughts down helps generate that feeling of being a part of my own mind enough to create something new and original.

In truth, however, I hate in person workshops. I feel that my ideas are never able to be articulated and shared when i am critiquing others and I often get nervous and anxious when my own writing will be looked over by a number of people who know my name and face and, to a point, my life. It gets rid of the disconnect I had grown so comfortable with while posting my work online for such a long time. It's also a lot harder to correct my spelling or very clearly spell out my thoughts when I am speaking aloud and not typing on my laptop.

In truth, if I had to chose between the two different sides of this blog, I'd have to go with writing and workshopping. No matter how much sitting in front of 16 of my peers and reading aloud scares me, I'd much rather hand write something, put it into a word document, and then get the critiques of people I know I can trust. People I know will be brutally honest with me. People who aren't afraid to be a little mean in order to give the best critique because they expect the same treatment in return. It's a different experience sitting in front of the class and being workshopped, but to a point it is better. It gives you that intimacy you need to truly get a good critique. Yeah, it's scary, but so are a lot of other things about writing. That doesn't result in a world is suddenly devoid of fiction so why should workshopping scare people away from writing classes and sharing their writing with peers?


Despite not having posted much in a while or really been a part of the community, I thought I'd share my profile from Figment.com. I plan on being more active come the summer and might even post some of my work from this semester!

Point of View Exercise

So, in class we had to take a story beginning and re-write it using a variety of points of view to sort of take us further into editing and revising and show us what we could do to change up our writing. This activity helped me discover the new way I wanted to write my story, "The Montgomery Chronicles", which I had been having trouble expand. I think that each POV (First reliable, First unreliable, Third omniscient, Third close, Dialogue only, and other) really has it's own strengths, but the one I found I favored has to be Third Person Close. I enjoy the intimacy it gives you with a character, and by switching character POVs every chapter, you could really develop a character well using this POV method. The one I disliked most was First Person Unreliable. I don't know why, but I have trouble making my character's in the first chapter or so of this story unreliable. I solved this by, instead, choosing a slightly different part of the beginning that features an antagonist and writing from his perspective, allowing me a conduit for the unreliability.

Below is my favorite POV snippet, Third Person Close.

I hope you enjoy!
-Amanda

"Sarafina stepped out of the shower, her hands running through her hair before moving to in front of the mirror. Her right hand flounced her hair forward over her shoulder as her left hand lifted her clumpy glasses to her pale face. “This is alright…” she thought as she examined herself, her hands running down her naked side and legs; her lips turning down at any jiggle.

            She grabbed a bra and underwear and slid them on before grabbing her hair dryer and trying to tame her blondish-gray waves. “My hair always looks so blah” she thought as she pulled and worked one inch pieces, “How the hell did it get this long?”

            Once she was pleased with how her hair fell, Sarafina took her glasses off and began to apply a light coat of make-up. She never put too much on, just enough to hide her occasional acne and take away the shadows her glasses cast on her cadet blue eyes." 

Blog #6: The Pink Institution

There is a lot of interesting writing eing published recently. It's like we, as a society of writers, have decided that it's time to take that plain old format of paragraphs on a page from start to end of a book and throw it out the window. No book that i've read recently shows this change in style than Selah Saterstrom's "The Pink Institution". Styled like it's a play or show, with an opening act and the sections of the book set up as if parts of a preformance, Pink Instution starts it's unique aura right off with the table of contents. It contains pictures, pages where all the words have huge gaps in between them and seem to not always flow, program guides from The Confederate Ball of 1938, and what could loosely be considered annoatated lists. It goes even deeper then formatting, however, as once you start reading you realize that Satersstrom not only changed from the conventional format, but also how a book is written. The story feels disjuncted and confusing at first. Clips of a person's life that turn into clips of a family's life that extends into an umbrella effect of lists and details that give you the entire lives and personalities of the people involved in the story. No character is left unexplored and at the end of the book, it feels like you have grown to know each and everyone of th characters.

At risk of spoilers I wont delve into the plot all too much (which I wouldn't normally do as this is an assignment but my god please go read this book!), but all I can say is that you get the gritty and realistic life stories of a set of almost absurdly unfortunate people. Saterstrom gives up this wave of emotion that I think can only be obtained through the unqiue style that Straterstrom has employed.

This book is so different from anything I have ever read that a comparison between two is almost impossible. It doesn't flow normally, it doesn't develop characters normally, it doesn't really do anything normally at all. The only book that even comes close in my mind is "The Great Gatsby", and purely from a perspective part. We see this story through the storytelling mind of a character that, despite being involved, feels almost outside and thirdperson to the entire story. Other than this comparison, I have no clue how to compare such a unique and extraordinarily new book to any other.

All in all, go read this book! It's a quick read that I personally couldn't put down.

You can find it here: http://coffeehousepress.org/shop/the-pink-institution-2/

Blog #5: A Literary Website

For this blog, we were instructed to pick a literary blog/website and blog a bit about it. I chose to do my short presentation/blog on Figment.com, a writing community created by John and Hank Green (also known as the Vlogbrothers on Youtube). Now, this website isn't exactly a writing blog (it does, however feature a blog called the Dailyfig which posts about writing contests and the winners of those contests as well as books to check out and the sorts), but it is a community that fosters and shares creativity. I personally love Figment as it provides a way for you to get your own writing out there, to look at other's writing, and to actually critique and comment on that writing. It allows you to learn about writers on the internet who are just starting or writers who have been writing forever but are utilizing this forum to meet and share with other writers. I have been able to grow confident in sharing my work and even grow as a writer due to the communication and critique I have gotten from using this website. On top of all that, it allows you to gain recognition for your writing through contests.

I love this website and I think that any writer should make an account and start to share their writing! It's an amazing experience and it truly makes you more confident about your writing in the long run.

Blog #4: Robert Olen Butler "Jealous Husband Returns In Form of Parrot"

For this blog, we were told to read a story from our text that has not yet been assigned for us to read and then make a post about it. I chose to read and blog about the 'story beginning' of  Robert Olen Butler's "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot". Below is an excerpt from the beginning of the story.

      I never can quite say as much as I know. I look at other parrots and I wonder if it's the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way. For instance, "Hello," I say, and I'm sitting on a perch in a pet store in Houston and what I'm really thinking is Holy shit. It's you. And what's happened is I'm looking at my wife.

      "Hello," she says, and she comes over to me and I can't believe how beautiful she is. Those great brown eyes, almost as dark as the center of mine. And her nose--I don't remember her for her nose but its beauty is clear to me now. Her nose is a little too long, but it's redeemed by the faint hook to it.

      She scratches the back of my neck.

      Her touch makes my tail flare. I feel the stretch and rustle of me back there. I bend my head to her and she whispers, "Pretty bird."

      For a moment I think she knows it's me. But she doesn't, of course. I say "Hello" again and I will eventually pick up "pretty bird." I can tell that as soon as she says it, but for now I can only give her another hello. Her fingertips move through my feathers and she seems to know about birds. She knows that to pet a bird you don't smooth his feathers down, you ruffle them.

      But of course she did that in my human life, as well. It's all the same for her. Not that I was complaining, even to myself, at that moment in the pet shop when she found me like I presume she was supposed to. She said it again, "Pretty bird," and this brain that works like it does now could feel that tiny little voice of mine ready to shape itself around these sounds. But before I could get them out of my beak there was this guy at my wife's shoulder and all my feathers went slick flat like to make me small enough not to be seen and I backed away. The pupils of my eyes pinned and dilated and pinned again.

      He circled around her. A guy that looked like a meat packer, big in the chest and thick with hair, the kind of guy that I always sensed her eyes moving to when I was alive. I had a bare chest and I'd look for little black hairs on the sheets when I'd come home on a day with the whiff of somebody else in the air. She was still in the same goddam rut.

      A “hello” wouldn't do and I'd recently learned “good night” but it was the wrong suggestion altogether, so I said nothing and the guy circled her and he was looking at me with a smug little smile and I fluffed up all my feathers, made myself about twice as big, so big he'd see he couldn't mess with me. I waited for him to draw close enough for me to take off the tip of his finger.

      But she intervened. Those nut-brown eyes were before me and she said, "I want him."

This demonstrates a good story beginning. It automatically brings up the conflict in the first paragraph of the story. This is a man who has done something in his life worthy of him being turned into a parrot and now his wife is about to buy him in a pet store. It has conversation (technically) between the husband-parrot and the wife. It has characterization. It even has a little humor. I know that after reading the first page and a half of this story I understood the main character, I understood the conflict he feels, and I was dying to read more. I mean, who wouldn't want to read a story about a dead guy who was turned into a parrot? I think that is honestly one of the best concepts in literature I've seen in our entire text! Not to mention Butler finds a way to give us what the overall conflict would be within these few paragraphs. It's seamlessly written so that, through this parrots choppy thought and incomplete speech, we can see that he is still just as jealous and mistrusting and possessive as he was in his past life. This leads my mind too so many places for where this story could lead! (And between you and me, I've read the ending and it's amazing! I never saw it coming. If you'd like to read it too here's a link to the full text.) Overall, this story beginning is well developed, well written, and fully pulls in and prepares the reader for what is going to happen in later pages. You should all check it out!

Mini Blog: Inspiration

"Read books. Care about things. Get excited. Try not to be down on yourself. Enjoy the ever present game of knowing." 

-John Green

This quote works as writing inspiration in an abstract way. With writing, like all things in life, you need to know things and experience things to be able to do it well. If you've never gone on a spontaneous adventure, how can you explain a spontaneous adventure realistically to a reader? If you've never been afraid or happy or depressed, how can you truthfully show those emotions. As a writer, you need to know about things, care about things, not be afraid to get too excited about life and learning. If you don't, your writing will reflect it. So you just need to "Enjoy the ever present game of knowing" and learn the shit out of everything you can.

Check out more quotes on writing and a good community for writers below!

John Green Quotes Worth Checking Out

Figment - A community for writers - I use Figment because it's a place where you can write poetry to short stories to novels. You can write fanfiction or realistic fiction detailing life and it's symbolism. You could write a silly story about a cow and it would fit in somewhere on this website. I like it because it gives you a place and community you can feel safe posting your works in.

Blog #2: Lahiri's "A Temporary Matter" and Story Beginings

--->I doubt it matters, but WARNING: SPOILERS TO LAHIRI'S "A TEMPORARY MATTER<---

The past few times my Fiction Writing class has met, we've discussed how stories begin. We've looked at Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried", Russell Bank' "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story" and Stuart Dybek's "We Didn't" and discussed how they began their stories and the impact it gave. We also analyzed our own story beginnings. This week, we were told to read Jumpa Lahiri's "A Temporary Matter" and blog about the beginning of the story and then compare it to the beginning of another story.

"A Temporary Matter"'s Story Beginning

 First, I'd like to say that "A Temporary Matter" (from here on referred to as ATM) is a phenomenally written piece that shows human nature and human interaction at it's purest. It shows how tragedy changes our relationships and our feelings. It demonstrates how our own self worth and opinion can affect how others see us. It let's the reader see and feel not only the sweetness of a love, but also the cruelty of resentment and reciprocation. It shows the demons we face when we face each other.

The beginning of the story, however, shows us human nature in a much different way; a way that I feel truly pushes this story to what makes it great.  Pasted below is the beginning of ATM and the full story is linked in the first paragraph of this post:

The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M. A line had gone down in the last snowstorm, and the repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings to set it right. The work would affect only the houses on the quiet tree-lined street, within walking distance of a row of brick-faced stores and a trolley stop, where Shoba and Shukumar had lived for three years. 

 “It’s good of them to warn us,” Shoba conceded after reading the notice aloud, more for her own benefit than Shukumar’s. She let the strap of her leather satchel, plump with files, slip from her shoulders, and left it in the hallway as she walked into the kitchen. She wore a navy blue poplin raincoat over gray sweatpants and white sneakers, looking, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she’d once claimed she would never resemble. 

She’d come from the gym. Her cranberry lipstick was visible only on the outer reaches of her mouth, and her eyeliner had left charcoal patches beneath her lower lashes. She used to look this way sometimes, Shukumar thought, on mornings after a party or a night at a bar, when she’d been too lazy to wash her face, too eager to collapse into his arms. She dropped a sheaf of mail on the table without a glance. Her eyes were still fixed on the notice in her other hand. “But they should do this sort of thing during the day.” 

“When I’m here, you mean,” Shukumar said. He put a glass lid on a pot of lamb, adjusting it so only the slightest bit of steam could escape. Since January he’d been working at home, trying to complete the final chapters of his dissertation on agrarian revolts in India. “When do the repairs start?”

 
“It says March nineteenth. Is today the nineteenth?” Shoba walked over to the framed corkboard that hung on the wall by the fridge, bare except for a calendar of William Morris wallpaper patterns. She looked at it as if for the first time, studying the wallpaper pattern carefully on the top half before allowing her eyes to fall to the numbered grid on the bottom. A friend had sent the calendar in the mail as a Christmas gift, even though Shoba and Shukumar hadn’t celebrated Christmas that year. 

“Today then,” Shoba announced. “You have a dentist appointment next Friday, by the way.”  He ran his tongue over the tops of his teeth; he’d forgotten to brush them that morning. It wasn’t the first time. He hadn’t left the house at all that day, or the day before. The more Shoba stayed out, the more she began putting in extra hours at work and taking on additional projects, the more he wanted to stay in, not even leaving to get the mail, or to buy fruit or wine at the stores by the trolley stop.

Six months ago, in September, Shukumar was at an academic conference in Baltimore when Shoba went into labor, three weeks before her due date. He hadn’t wanted to go to the conference, but she had insisted; it was important to make contacts, and he would be entering the job market next year. She told him that she had his number at the hotel, and a copy of his schedule and flight numbers, and she had arranged with her friend Gillian for a ride to the hospital in the event of an emergency. When the cab pulled away that morning for the airport, Shoba stood waving good-bye in her robe, with one arm resting on the mound of her belly as if it were a perfectly natural part of her body.  Each time he thought of that moment, the last moment he saw Shoba pregnant, it was the cab he remembered most, a station wagon, painted red with blue lettering. It was cavernous compared to their own car. Although Shukumar was six feet tall, with hands too big ever to rest comfortably in the pockets of his jeans, he felt dwarfed in the back seat. As the cab sped down Beacon Street, he imagined a day when he and Shoba might need to buy a station wagon of their own, to cart their children back and forth from music lessons and dentist ppointments. He imagined himself gripping the wheel, as Shoba turned around to hand the children juice boxes. Once, these images of parenthood had troubled Shukumar, adding to his anxiety that he was still a student at thirty-five. But that early autumn morning, the trees still heavy with bronze leaves, he welcomed the image for the first time.  A member of the staff had found him somehow among the identical convention rooms and handed him a stiff square of stationery. It was only a telephone number, but Shukumar knew it was the hospital. When he returned to Boston it was over. The baby had been born dead. Shoba was lying on a bed, asleep, in a private room so small there was barely enough space to stand beside her, in a wing of the hospital they hadn’t been to on the tour for expectant parents. Her placenta had weakened and she’d had a cesarean, though not quickly enough. The doctor explained that these things happen. He smiled in the kindest way it was possible to smile at people known only professionally. Shoba would be back on her feet in a few weeks. There was nothing to indicate that she would not be able to have children in the future. 

These days Shoba was always gone by the time Shukumar woke up. He would open his eyes and see the long black hairs she shed on her pillow and think of her, dressed, sipping her third cup of coffee already, in her office downtown, where she searched for typographical errors in textbooks and marked them, in a code she had once explained to him, with an assortment of colored pencils. She would do the same for his dissertation, she promised, when it was ready. He envied her the specificity of her task, so unlike the elusive nature of his. He was a mediocre student who had a facility for absorbing details without curiosity. Until September he had been diligent if not dedicated, summarizing chapters, outlining arguments on pads of yellow lined paper. But now he would lie in their bed until he grew bored, gazing at his side of the closet which Shoba always left partly open, at the row of the tweed jackets and corduroy trousers he would not have to choose from to teach his classes that semester. After the baby died it was too late to withdraw from his teaching duties. But his adviser had arranged things so that he had the spring semester to himself. Shukumar was in his sixth year of graduate school. “That and the summer should give you a good push,” his adviser had said. “You should be able to wrap things up by next September.”  But nothing was pushing Shukumar. Instead he thought of how he and Shoba had become experts at avoiding each other in their three-bedroom house, spending as much time on separate floors as possible. He thought of how he no longer looked forward to weekends, when she sat for hours on the sofa with her colored pencils and her files, so that he feared that putting on a record in his own house might be rude. He thought of how long it had been since she looked into his eyes and smiled, or whispered his name on those rare occasions they still reached for each other’s bodies before sleeping.  In the beginning he had believed that it would pass, that he and Shoba would get through it all somehow. She was only thirty-three. She was strong, on her feet again. But it wasn’t a consolation. It was often nearly lunchtime when Shukumar would finally pull himself out of bed and head downstairs to the coffeepot, pouring out the extra bit Shoba left for him, along with an empty mug, on the countertop. 

Through the start of ATM, Lahiri gives us a picture of a couple torn apart by the death of a child. It shows a marriage falling apart and two people who are not happy together. This sets us up with the idea that this story is going to either fix their marriage, or show it deteriorating further. By setting things up this way, Lahiri gives us, the readers, a unique experience. Or, it gave me a unique experience. By setting the story up the way she did, Lahiri led me to feeling as if I was experiencing the same situation. She gave me a real enough, a tangible enough, situation that I was able to connect and put myself into the dining room with Shoba and Shukumar. I put myself in their shoes and felt as distant and repelled and alone as both of the characters did throughout the story. In my opinion, that is how a story like this should start. It should start in such a way that you are not only introduced to the characters and the conflict, but that you are pulled into the conflict as if it involved you as well. If the story doesn't hook the reader like this, I don't know if a story showing such harsh reality would really be able to anchor a reader's attention.

Comparison To Another Story Beginning

The second aspect of this blog is comparing the beginning of ATM to the beginning of another piece of fiction. The comparative piece I chose is one of my favorite books, F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". I chose this book because, despite seeming completely different from the beginning of ATM, the beginning has an abundance of similarities. The beginning of Gatsby is below:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

 

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

 

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

 

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

The start of Gatsby, like ATM, shows quite a bit of human nature. ATM had two characters, allowing them to play off each other to develop that sense of closeness and the abundance of human nature-y content. With Gatsby, what we have is a single person and an internal dialogue that introduces the story and that character, as well as that of the story's namesake, Gatsby. Nick, the narrator, is what many would consider an unreliable narrator. Here he explains a bit about his past and his own personal observations about himself. Because of this, he shows a darker side of human nature, much like Shoba and Shukumar, however with a different twist. In ATM, they showed a relationship and the ups and downs and lights and darks of human interactions. With Gatsby, the beginning showcases the human nature of our relationships with ourselves.

Nick, in this beginning, shows that people lie to themselves. He shows an ignorance to his own human nature. Of course, directly from the beginning of the story, we can't entirely see this. It isn't until you learn more about the story and about the narrator that you truly see Nick's nature. However, when one truly looks at it, you still get a sort of bitter sweet feeling from these few paragraphs. You get the feeling that something isn't quite right about Nick and his own self description. Because of this, I feel that this beginning accurately shows the demons one can face when facing themselves. It shows that a person will go as far as they can to up hold an opinion of themselves, even if it means warping a view of an entire book (or life, you get the point).

ATM showcases the demons we face when we face each other. Gatsby showcases the demons we face when we face ourselves. In both story beginnings, you get pulled into the conflict and into the characters, albeit in different ways. In the end, both stories are similar not because they are based off the same motifs or because they are based around the same sort of story or symbolism, but because both are successfully written story beginnings.

You should go read both of these as they are both amazing stories!

New Year's Resolutions

So, I've always created a list of resolutions and told myself, day after day, that I would keep them. This year was no different. I laid out a mental list of the things I want to change in my life. I would share them here, but i'm a firm believer that telling someone your resolutions is step one to not completing them! Anyway, this year was no different. For the first few weeks I powered through it and completed daily tasks to build towards the change, but now? Now i'm starting to slack off and drop them once again! This year is going to be different though, and that isn't just a feeling, i'm taking active steps and i've decided to share them with you!

• First, https://habitrpg.com/static/front. I'm really big into rpg games and for anyone else who is this might be perfect for you! It's a website that makes an rpg game out of your life. Habitrpg allows you to set daily tasks that will drain health if not completed, make a to do list with rewards and deadlines, create a list of habits that could have positive or negative effects depending, and have a list of rewards that you can unlock by completing tasks day in and day out in order to keep those New Year's Resolutions in check.

• Second, http://litreactor.com/columns/write-every-day-in-2014-14-steps-for-forming-a-writing-habit. A goal i've had for the last few years is to write a little bit every day, but each year i've failed by getting distracted or just telling myself I didn't have the time. For anyone who has a similar problem, I suggest you read this post! It lists ways that you can stick to writing every day. The best thing? It doesn't have to apply to just writing! It can apply to any new habit you are trying to form, be it exercise, reading, taking the stairs, etc.

• Third, http://karenkavett.com/blog/2037/dont-break-the-chain-calendar-2014.php. These lovely little things, which I first saw on the youtube channel Charlieissocoollike, are amazing! They give you a calendar for the whole year and you can print one for each resolution you have! They even have different colors! You can set the repetition pattern of the habit (i.e. I want to walk my dog every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday). You should definitely check them out!

• Fourth, I'm trying to appreciate the little things. I'm doing this by taking part in the 100 Days of Happiness Facebook status revolution! Basically, every day, for a hundred days, you post about what made you happy that day. Wether you had a crappy day or not, it is your job to pick one thing out at least and post it! I'm not doing to well on the posting them on time part of it, but no matter what it's still making me think about the things that make me smile every day. 

• Finally, I'm making an active change in my way of thinking. Yes, this in itself is something I'll have to work hard to do, but it's time I did. I've spent my whole life a pessimist who was afraid to take chances. This year, that stops. I'm done being afraid to live my own life! I plan on trying new things and living life for the now instead of cowering in a mental corner afraid of what people will think about my past and present and even future actions. 

Here's to an amazing 2014 full of new experiences, new people, and new habits!

Blog #1: My Author Inspiration

"Could I -- could I say good-bye to him, sir?" asked Hagrid. He bent his

great, shaggy head over Harry and gave him what must have been a very

scratchy, whiskery kiss. Then, suddenly, Hagrid let out a howl like a

wounded dog.

"Shhh!" hissed Professor McGonagall, "you'll wake the Muggles!"

"S-s-sorry," sobbed Hagrid, taking out a large, spotted handkerchief and

burying his face in it. "But I c-c-can't stand it -- Lily an' James dead

-- an' poor little Harry off ter live with Muggles -"

"Yes, yes, it's all very sad, but get a grip on yourself, Hagrid, or

we'll be found," Professor McGonagall whispered, patting Hagrid gingerly

on the arm as Dumbledore stepped over the low garden wall and walked to

the front door. He laid Harry gently on the doorstep, took a letter out

of his cloak, tucked it inside Harry's blankets, and then came back to

the other two. For a full minute the three of them stood and looked at

the little bundle; Hagrid's shoulders shook, Professor McGonagall

blinked furiously, and the twinkling light that usually shone from

Dumbledore's eyes seemed to have gone out.

"Well," said Dumbledore finally, "that's that. We've no business staying

here. We may as well go and join the celebrations."

"Yeah," said Hagrid in a very muffled voice, "I'll be takin' Sirius his

bike back. G'night, Professor McGonagall -- Professor Dumbledore, sir."

Wiping his streaming eyes on his jacket sleeve, Hagrid swung himself

onto the motorcycle and kicked the engine into life; with a roar it rose

into the air and off into the night.

"I shall see you soon, I expect, Professor McGonagall," said Dumbledore,

nodding to her. Professor McGonagall blew her nose in reply.

Dumbledore turned and walked back down the street. On the corner he

stopped and took out the silver Put-Outer. He clicked it once, and

twelve balls of light sped back to their street lamps so that Privet

Drive glowed suddenly orange and he could make out a tabby cat slinking

around the corner at the other end of the street. He could just see the

bundle of blankets on the step of number four.

"Good luck, Harry," he murmured. He turned on his heel and with a swish

of his cloak, he was gone.

A breeze ruffled the neat hedges of Privet Drive, which lay silent and

tidy under the inky sky, the very last place you would expect

astonishing things to happen. Harry Potter rolled over inside his

blankets without waking up. One small hand closed on the letter beside

him and he slept on, not knowing he was special, not knowing he was

famous, not knowing he would be woken in a few hours' time by Mrs.

Dursley's scream as she opened the front door to put out the milk

bottles, nor that he would spend the next few weeks being prodded and

pinched by his cousin Dudley... He couldn't know that at this very

moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up

their glasses and saying in hushed voices: "To Harry Potter -- the boy

who lived!"

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

   The author who has inspired me the most, throughout my entire writing career, has to be J.K. Rowling. At seven years old, my older sister read the first Harry Potter book aloud to me as we sat in our shared bedroom late at night. I don't know if it was how well she portrayed her world, my sister's passion and connection to the words she was reading, or the atmosphere of reading a book about witches and wizards in a dark room at night when we should have been asleep, but J.K. Rowling captured my mind and hasn't let go since. The first time I sat down at a desk with a red crayon and a piece of printer paper to write a barely legible, thirty word story about a dog eating chips; I sat down with the thought of writing something just like Harry Potter.

   Today, I can re-read the beloved series and acknowledge what about the way J.K. Rowling portrayed Hogwarts really got inside my head and compelled me to write every day for almost 12 years in counting: the world itself. It isn't the way she writes or the story she tells, to me it was the world she created that drew me in. The idea that one could just create their own world and make it feel so real was alien to me, and that's what made it so interesting. I wanted to mimic her. I wanted to write my own story with my own world that would one day capture the hearts of children and parents alike.

   To this day, that is still my inspiration whenever I sit down to write a story or develop an idea. I want to take two sisters, bored with Barbies and matchbox cars and give them a portal into an entire world--and an entire lifetime--of magic. 

As per my assignment (for which this was written), J.K. Rowling uses standard punctuation throughout. 

Here are a few links relating to J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. 

Pottermore.com: an interactive way to experience Harry Potter. It's technically for children, but if you sign up you can find out your wand and your house!

J.K. Rowling's Official Website

The Harry Potter Wiki Page, a great place to find all things Harry Potter

"15 Years Later" Interview With J.K. Rowling

A Link to My Favorite Harry Potter Character (Excluding the main three)