Critical Reflection Essay

Critical Reflection Essay

Fiction and Innovative Form has encouraged me to reflect on the way I approach writing, my writing process and, of course, the possibilities available beyond traditional form. The importance of form hadHAS?? already been highlighted for me in Poetry and Innovative Form. To now consider it not from a poetry point of view but prose narrative was something I was curious about and which has proved itself to be greatly liberating, as the traditional approach used is, in ways we do not even realize, restricting.

While the usual narrative pattern has its advantages, such as its familiarity, how easy it is to follow, safetySAFELY? , in the sense that it almost never fails, it also has a tendency to create predictable, borderline cliché work and, more than anything, has made our creative process restricted and does not give us enough space to be creative to our full potential.????

The exercises done throughout this module not only made me have to approach writing in a different manner but also helped me write in a more individualistic, unconstrained way. As discussed in week 1, innovative form allows the writer to record and organize experience on the page differently from normative?? writing. This is what I aim to do in my portfolio: record and organize human experience in an innovative manner.

One of the things I particularly like about innovative form is how dedicated it is to ‘capturing a moment’ which is something I am normally drawn to. This (fact) made it even more interesting to endeavour in this new approach as it has allowed me a comparison of approaches and consequently observing OBSERVE the different results which I can compare to previous work that follows the traditional narrative form.

As well as making me reflect and change the way I interact with written material, !iInnovative !!fForm has made me contemplate the finality of a ‘completed’ piece. It has made me realize how endless the possibilities truly are. As pointed out by Roland Barthes in !!' Image, Music, Text'!! “The narratives of the world are numberless.” (79) This, of course, is something any writer can attest TO??, and IS one of, if not the most, exciting aspect of writing. However, this module, has made me consider Roland Barthes’s statement differently. The possibilities do not end when we decide we have reached the ‘final’ piece of work, in many ways, and in the case of innovative form, this is OFTEN?? just the beginning.

Prose fiction is about what happens and how it happens, it’s about actions taking place in time and how you organize those actions. (week 1)? This was at the forefront of my mind throughout this module and particularly when putting together my portfolio. The organization of the actions talked about were, in quite a literal sense, reflected in writing in the short story ‘erosive’ in Ali Smith’s book !'The whole story and other stories'!. One of my favourite pieces of writing !!I!! read for this module, this short story, served as a reference in the arrangement of my portfolio. In the past, the portfolios I have assembled are usually a rundown of the work I produce throughout the module, which allows me to reflect on my work in a broader sense. Nevertheless, this was also one of the reasons, and in the spirit of this module, why I decided to try a new approach. This turned out to be quite challenging as I struggled with making the portfolio a cohesive piece.

The governing themes in my portfolio are the uncanny and the macabre, which meant that I aimed to make each piece, in one way or another feel gruesome and inscrutable. My main idea, inspired in the piece I wrote in the first week EN?titled ‘Red Liquid’, was to focus on a tragic death of someone who ACTUALLY wanted to die. While this, inevitably, was always IN!!on the back of my mind, I opted to focus on more general themes as I felt that if I got too specific that would condition my creative process and unconsciously restrict my writing.

Considering what my focus was and to achieve the feeling I was exploring through my portfolio, resorting to writing in innovative form had interesting results. Although the pieces of writing in the portfolio are all interwoven, complementing each other and revealing more and contributing to the overall narrative, each piece is meant to stand on its own as well. I start T?? in the middle of the narrative with ‘The Raven’ and continueT?? with the unconventional order, as seen in ‘erosive’,?? throughout. The piece of writing that follows was based ON Tom Philips’ !!'A Humument'!!, Tthe idea of simply singling out words one finds interesting to create work was not only fun to do but created unpredictable outcomes which, in some cases, I then explored further.

In the piece succeeding??  ,PP titled ‘The Mmilk’ I attempt to use repetition. I drawDREW??  upon Gertrude Stein’s work to achieve this. In many ways, I feel that the use of repetition, not only contributes to setting the tone of the piece but also gives us more information ((of the feeling)) this situation is arousing. The reader gets to follow the information being processed, this being looked at and said in various ways, mimicking what one would be inclined to do in the face of such AN occurrence. In turn, it also influences our perception of time, making us question whether the information is being processed in a single minute or an hour. Using repetition proves itself incredibly effective in evoking feelings of shock and confusion, it makes what is actually being said not as important. It captures the situation, in my opinion, more effectively than traditional form, translating feelings while sharing less which was interesting to observe as traditional form would have been, in the past, the way I would automatically take.

 In addition to undertaking organizing the events in time in a different manner I also felt IT? important to explore the role of the narrator in an innovative piece. Throughout my portfolio the narrator is ambiguous. In my writing I use ‘you’ and ‘I’ as the main, and in some pieces, only personal pronouns to allow the reader to decide for THEMSELFthemselves. The reader needs to pay very close attention to be able to tell who is actually telling the story 
,. IT it is up to them to distinguish whether it is a first, second- or third-person narration. This ambiguity surrounding the narrator also contributes to feeling like there may be a more sinister explanation, there may be an observer that is looking into someone’s life without permission, the feeling of the uncanny heightened by the reader not knowing who the narrator is.

The mixture of perspectives culminates in the piece TITLEDtitles ‘At Philies’ which was written taking turns from the perspective of the person inside the café and another person outside looking in. This piece of writing was inspired by Edward Hopper’s painting ‘Nighthawks’, .!! It!! it felt appropriate to not only create pieces from other people’s written work but also attempt!!! to do so with a painting. To create something from someone else’s work and observe how different the outcome often is ( CAN BE)  IS something I find fascinating.

 Collage was my favourite approach to innovative form. XX, It!!  it was captivating to be able to engage with the written word physically, seeing the process happen before your MY??eyes in a clear and obvious way which made it all the more rewarding. Another approach I enjoyed exploring was constraints. There are two pieces of writing that follow a constraint in my portfolio, one titled ‘After’ where I had to start every sentence with the word ‘test’. And the other, ‘Take Something’ where I couldn’t use personal pronouns. The result of this was not only very different from how I would typically write but also made for an interesting exploration of perspective in a different sense from before. This constraint was though of??? after realizing how much I was using ‘I’ and ‘you’ which meant that even when writing using innovative form I has?? started to restrict myself ,?? as was the case with other aspects already mentioned.

As innovative form concentrates on having no rules and liberating the writer from the natural constraints that we follow in traditional form the hybrid form was also to be attempted. In ‘Red’ I attempt to mix poetry and prose. In another piece of work titled ‘Red Liquid’ I use some of Bernadette Mayer’s approaches by using long sentences, time shift and mixing interior and exterior observations (week 2)

Innovative form liberates us from not only the restriction in traditional form but also the usual approached?? we take to writing. It is valuable to keep us feeling liberated and open to the possibilities available. It allows us to venture where we have not been before, observing and communicating in a new, exiting way. What one is able to do with form never ceases to amaze me, it can create unexpected, interesting work. This is one of the main things I will retain from Fiction and Innovative Form, which, I feel, captures the essence of the module ???quite nicely: the possibilities really are endless.