Tag: writing

Bittersweet

Jeannie Marie 1 Comment

The Magic of Grease Live! Why Representation Matters: Looking at the Korean Wave through the Asian Diaspora. A Success Story in the Making: Buzzfeed and the Era of Clickbait. How The Princess Diaries was my First Feminist Movie. Looking for Authenticity in K-pop and K-Hip-Hop. Is Music Dying – or is it Thriving? Why Children’s Movies Matter.

This is only a smattering of topics, only a few titles to future blog posts left unwritten. They are left unwritten because this is my last post on this wonderful, amazing blog.

When I first submitted my application to arts,ink, I didn’t know what I was getting into. I had emailed my former-boss and now friend, asking about jobs at the office where Arts at Michigan is housed, the Office of New Student Programs. A friend of mine had told me that she had heard that they were hiring people to work at their front desk and answer phones. As someone who did not want to work in a dining hall (and succeeded in avoiding it all three years here), I took the chance and ran with it.

I got an email back saying there were no office positions open, but I could apply to two blogs – arts,ink and arts[seen]. I applied for both, and even preferred arts[seen], because I loved going to see shows and concerts, and I thought that learning to review them would be a good skill to add to my arsenal before I left college. I had low hopes, though, thinking every writer on campus would be applying for this job. Much to my surprise, I got an email a couple of weeks later welcoming me to the team – to the arts family.

I got hired as a columnist arts,ink, and I wondered how I was going write about something every single week for the rest of the year. I had so much writing to do for my classes already, not to mention the reading and other assignments for classes that weren’t English classes.

But now that I’m leaving, I don’t know where the time went, how I didn’t get to talk about these things that are still so important to me. It seems like just yesterday I was freaking out because Michigan Pops shared my post about their concert, or that I could not believe that I had gotten 5 comments on a post about what I thought was a little-known Chinese singer (the comments doubled to ten as I responded to every one of them).

A lot of people asked me throughout my time at Michigan why I never joined any of the other student publications on campus, as there are many. No one really reads these blogs. My friends and family of course read my posts, but even then, I know they don’t read religiously. When I send them links, they read, and they tell me how much they liked it, but besides that, Arts doesn’t get the readership that other places get. So why didn’t I join any other publications, you ask?

Because none of them felt like home like arts did. Arts encouraged freedom, encouraged discipline, encouraged creativity. I didn’t have to follow a weekly prompt or format. My task was simply to talk about art, in any way possible. And it’s in this freedom that I found my home.

I feel so incredibly blessed that I got to spend three years here. Writing, editing, reading other posts – I’ve loved every minute of it. It’s definitely been a challenge, trying to stay constantly creative while in a college environment that, at times, discourages creativity. And trying to keep up with posting every week while also trying to juggle school and clubs and friendships and families was never easy, especially this year, as a senior preparing to graduate.

But it was all worth it. I’ve become a better writer, a better reader, a better thinker – I’m constantly thinking and analyzing my surroundings, what I see in the media, what others tell me about their experiences.

Maybe there’s been some topics that have been left unexplored. But that’s okay. Because arts,ink will keep going, inducting new writers next year, freshman arriving on campus with wide eyes and ready pens, seniors looking to put their stamp on the arts community before they end their time at Michigan.

So this blog is dedicated to you, future writers at arts,ink. We may be the underdogs, but you have just found a community that will always support you, never limit you, always push you to write more, to constantly engage in the thriving arts community on campus. It may be time for me to leave, but it’s your time to shine.

Writing as Self-Care

Jeannie Marie Leave a comment

Lately I’ve been pretty into self-care. Recently, I’ve been doing more yoga, and it’s definitely always made a positive impact on my life, especially when I can stop and just let myself breathe for a little bit, instead of letting myself get overwhelmed by circling my head around the infinite number of things I need to do before the end of the month. And I’ve been telling myself that I need to buy some actual yoga classes from a studio instead of just going around doing the free classes (thank you yoga studios for free classes though, they are the absolute best), although my wallet definitely does not agree.

But because of this increase in going to yoga, I’ve also just been thinking about self-care in general, in that it seems like in college I’ve always been stressed. It’s like I operate constantly on a small level of stress, and it always rises, and sometimes deflates, but never actually goes all the way down. And then the best way to deal with it is to read all the click-bait: “13 gifs of The Office that is College Life” or “15 tweets that completely explain how you’re doing in the semester right now.” We constantly circulate these posts of self-pity because we know that everyone else is doing as poorly as we are, and somehow twist it into entertainment.

But I remember a time before all this, in high school. I think it’s easy to think about high school as “the easy days” but also never wanting to go back (because let’s face it, high school sucks). But to me, high school wasn’t easy. It was honestly probably just as rough as college is now, just in a different, more naive way. I went to a college prep school where I was one of the top students, and even though I failed AP Calculus and only passed AP Chem because our teacher pitied our class, I still maintained just being shy of the top-ten percent my senior year (I was ranked seventh out of sixty-nine, so if you round up, I was). But I’d be lying if I said that was easy. I was stressing about getting into college, doing as many clubs as possible my senior year, as well as trying to take as many AP Classes without killing myself. I was crazy busy, even if now it seems like I barely remember it.

But the difference between me then and me now is that I wrote. I have multiple journals, both handwritten and typed, starting from middle school all the way until senior year. I documented much of my life, often because it was a lot harder to talk to my friends, and I grew up as an only child. I used my journal as a way of keeping my stress levels low – once I poured my heart out to my journal, I always felt a whole lot better.

Not only did I keep a journal, though, I was constantly writing. I have about a million different documents, some with bits and pieces of long forgotten projects, some filled with pages dedicated to one idea. I was always thinking of ideas, always writing them down, always staying inspired. I constantly looked up new artists, new music, looked for new books to read, bought more books to read. In some ways, high school was my most fertile time for creative exploration. I wrote poems, I wrote song lyrics, I wrote short stories, I wrote essays – but I never wrote because I had to. It was always just for the pure enjoyment of writing.

But now, in college, it feels selfish to want to sit down and write just for fun when I could be working on the next three papers I have due, or the discussion posts, or even my pieces for this blog. The weekend I cranked out over 20 pages of a story for the Hopwoods, my roommate told me how proud of me she was – not just because she liked the story (which made me so happy because part of me wondered if a lot of it was sleep deprived nonsense) but also because I sat down and wrote this entire story that still has places to go in a little over 48 hours, ignoring all my school work in order to focus on this mini passion project in the middle of the semester. She saw how happy it made me to work on it and to talk on it, and how inspired it made me.

But writing like that can’t always happen – I still have those papers to write. Sure, maybe if I want to go to graduate school and join a creative writing cohort, that’s what my life would be like. That’s not reality, though, and the truth is I have to graduate and find a job.

In some ways, I think that writing, reading, and staying creatively engaged was part of my self-care in high school. I may not have done yoga to calm my mind, but once I wrote a short story where the characters were probably too close to real life for comfort, I felt like I had gotten the problem off my chest. Maybe it wasn’t resolved, but it calmed my mind. And I miss that, I miss using my anger, my sadness, my happiness as fuel for writing, if only to keep me writing. Because although I feel like I’m constantly writing something in college, I still haven’t gotten to stretch my creative muscles out as much as I would like.

But the good news is I’m graduating, and even with job searching and part-timing and every other crazy thing that life throws at me, I know that I can always fall back on writing. Even if my self-care methods change, that love that I have will never change.

Passions vs. The Real World

Jeannie Marie Leave a comment

It’s that time of the semester.

If you are currently in college, you know what I mean. Today in class one of my professors spoke openly with us, telling us that professors hated this time of year. After months of snow and winter and general gloominess, the effects are starting to show in students. They raise their hands less often, they feel more lethargic, and he described it as just a general atmosphere that all professors dread.

As for me, I can definitely feel it. It’s not only the lack of warmth and sunshine (that we seem to finally be getting here in Michigan), but just the everything-ness of this time of the semester. It’s not just having to do schoolwork, it’s having to do schoolwork, and find time for meetings, and friends, and jobs, and summer plans, and family, and – for some of us – graduation. It’s a list that goes on and on.

Last night I read through a short story I wrote this semester for the Hopwood Awards. I didn’t write a blog post about this, but it’s the first time I’ve been brave enough to submit anything I’ve written. I decided screw it, I’m a senior, it’s now or never, and wrote a 20+ page short story in the span of about three days, which, if you are a writer, know how incredibly short that is. I even got up at 9 a.m. to finish it up before the deadline, shocking my roommates who typically don’t see me up and awake before 11, sometimes even noon.

But I was thinking about how much joy that gave me, even in the midst of the crazy semester around me. I banged out a 20+ paper because it was something I’m passionate about. Writing, for me, has always been something I’m passionate about. And at the moment, I’m working on a research paper for a class..and yet I’m not. I can’t work on it, because I have so many other thousands of millions of things to do.

Inspiration and creativity are some of the most elusive characteristics of writing. A lot of advice I’ve been given in college surrounding my writing is to keep doing it, even when inspiration doesn’t hit.

But I never seem to have trouble with inspiration – it’s always the time. I get so frustrated that I have other things I could be doing besides working on a short story or writing Part 2 of the blog post about albums (I promise, it’s coming). And then this frustration gets worse whenever I realize that I have to do things I don’t want to in order to do the things I love, like write and read and watch TV (and think critically about watching TV).

But sometimes, life doesn’t work that way. I don’t like it, but it’s the truth.

This message is brought to you by a stressed college student who knows she shouldn’t be stressed but is anyways.*
*never stop writing, even when you’re stressed

Me, Myself, and I

camsterdam Leave a comment
Image via gyphy.com

Sure, we all learned the types of point of view in, like, third grade. But I was told something the other day during my Creative Writing Tutorial that crumbled everything that I thought I knew.

I’m a fan of the first person. Yes, there may be some editors and publishers out there who are cringing right now, but let me explain myself. To me, the first person point of view allows a kind of depth that is unachievable by any other viewpoint. You get to know intimately the tone and voice of your character. Sarcasm can come much more freely in the first person because the voice and emotion that sarcasm depends upon is omnipresent. Third person requires quotation marks and dialogue in order to make use of sarcasm.

We as humans were born to tell stories. It’s what you probably did two minutes ago to your roommate. It’s what you are texting to your mom right now. It’s what our ancestors did every night for fun. The myths they told, of course, almost always were in the third person. For example, Hercules did this great thing. Then, he beat up a lion. Then, he fell in love with the mysterious Meg… and so on.

Image via gyphy.com

But, these people that historically were spoken of in third person were mostly gods or heroic figures of history or people who seemed larger than life. They are beings that we may aspire to resemble, but will never actually become them. In contrast, we always tell anecdotes of ourselves in the first person. This allows for a subjective perspective rather than objectively factual (remember Hercules did this, then he did that). As the words come out of our mouth, we have the ability to embellish the “I” as fancifully or plainly or victoriously or victimized-ly as we want. This unreliability of first person is what draws me to the viewpoint the most. I’m fascinated by the psychology behind human credibility. Can we really trust what we see? Or do feelings get in the way and we end up seeing what we want to see? What motivation does a character have of lying to his/her reader? Then again, what motivation do we humans have when we omit parts of the truth from the stories we tell? This doubt and uncertainty is what makes our characters the most human. This is what readers bond to when they read a first-person story – the humanness of the character. Essentially, this tenuous relationship between truth and story is what makes them read on and perhaps read a bit more closely.

Now to the mind-blowing. Turning in my ninth draft of a first person narrated story I’ve been writing, my professor says, “You can cut down on wordiness by letting the narrator do the talking and just have your character experience the events happening around her.” My eyebrows pinched together in confusion. “But aren’t my narrator and the main character actually the same person?”

“No,” she responded. *poof* went my brain and the lie I’ve been living.

Image via gyphy.com

I asked my professor to give me an example. She explained: Your character, sitting in an airport, could say, “I saw the janitor drop his cell phone in shock.” But, if you get rid of the words “I saw,” what do you have left? The janitor dropped his cell phone in shock.

So, what do you achieve by omitting the words “I saw?” Well, a few things actually. First, you move the sentence and the action along, so your reader doesn’t get caught up in extraneous words. (This is along the same lines as why we are told to omit the words “I think” and “I believe” in academic papers). But, the crazy thing is that it leaves the sentence up to interpretation. Did the main  character see this happen or not? A writer can use this scene description to showcase other activities going on around the main character to heighten drama OR to draw attention away from the character for whatever reason OR to emphasize that something is happening simultaneously to the main character’s actions that the character may or may not have seen! This “showing” rather than “self-reporting” narrator gives the reader a VIP pass inside the scene, in the same vein as dramatic irony. It allows us to know more about the story and fictional world than the main character herself.

This discovery was especially timely because there is a sense of this narrative split in the movie “The Lady in the Van.”

In the (mostly true) film, the main character Alan Bennett (Alex Jennings) is a writer who allows a homeless woman (Maggie Smith)  to park and live inside her van in his driveway for 15 years. Although the plot itself has its own bizarre and unique qualities, I was struck by the choice to double Alan Bennett, much like Lindsay Lohan in the Parent Trap. Indeed, throughout the film, we see identical images of Alan Bennett next to each other, talking to each other, mostly arguing with each other. The two representations symbolize the split personalities between “the writer” and “the one who lives”, or the narrator and the experiencer. I’ve never seen this portrayed in a film before but it made me begin to understand what my professor was trying to tell me in class. And perhaps it begins to explain my own psychology as a writer. There indeed is always one hand on reality and one hand writing the next sentence.

 

Romance, Here I Come

Jeannie Marie Leave a comment

So I know I talked about Jane the Virgin a couple of weeks ago, but there was an important fact about the show that I forgot to mention.

Besides the million other things that I love about the show, one fact that I’ve always found comforting is that Jane aspires to be a writer. Though she has a degree in teaching, English specifically, her dream is to be a writer. And she actively pursues that dream, oftentimes over her romantic interests – right now, she’s in a creative writing cohort in graduate school.

But this wasn’t all that impressed me about her. To be honest, stories about writers are dime a dozen. For some reason, writers love to write about writers. Call it vanity, but it’s true. No, it wasn’t the fact that Jane was an inspiring writer. It was the fact that she’s an aspiring romance writer.

And guess what? No one says anything about it. Nothing. Her advisor doesn’t call her writing silly. Her mom doesn’t wonder why she doesn’t write a different genre. None of her romantic interests has ever questioned that maybe romance writing is not actually writing, that it’s not serious writing.

Nope. Nada. Nein. Jane is, and always will be, an unapologetic romance writer. And that shouldn’t actually be surprising. But it totally is.

Although I won’t name names, I will say that one time, I got an interesting critique back on a short story. It was, in a way, a romance, but a fabricated one. It wasn’t about love, it was about obsession, and it was meant as a thoughtful questioning of what is the difference between those two. But, in short, yes, it was about a relationship, this one between a man and a woman. But the critique? I remember words like “not feeling it” and “the vibe is wrong,” though this is probably also partially from my poor memory. But one that I do remember? “I don’t think I’m your intended audience.”  

Intended audience or not, does it really matter? Does it matter that my writing was borderline romance? Does it matter if I talked about love? Does it matter if the center of the story was a relationship?

I remember, even though that story was definitely a tough critique, one of my harder ones, that’s what hurt me the most. This person, whatever gender, didn’t take my story seriously enough because automatically it was categorized as romance. And because of it, I couldn’t get a serious critique about it, and it was harder to see what I could change to make the story better without thinking about the “intended audience” and whether I was pleasing that audience.

I was thinking about this in part because it’s Valentine’s Day this weekend, partially because Jane the Virgin was about her romance this week, and partially because I’ve been bingeing a very explicitly romance series.

But you know what? Despite the fact that it’s Valentine’s Day and I’m technically alone, instead of being lame, I’m going to the poetry reading at Literati on Saturday by Amber Tamblyn and then I’m going to do yoga with my best friends. You know what else I’m gonna do? I’m going to watch my romance movies, my romance TV shows, my romance everything. And I’m going to love it and not be ashamed.

Oh, and you know what else? I’m going to write romance. Unapologetic, unabashed, fantastic, life-changing romance. And you’re going to like it.

How Not To Write An Ending

Jeannie Marie Leave a comment

So last night, sitting on the couch with my roommate roaming Netflix, we decided to watch a movie called Stuck in Love, a movie directed by Josh Boone of The Fault in Our Stars fame. Now bear with me for a second, because this isn’t a review, but it’s going to sound like one for a minute. I’d been dying to watch it, and it was an hour and a half, the time my roommate had until she had to Skype with her best friend to watch The Bachelor (don’t even get me started on The Bachelor), so we decided to watch it – or, rather, I did, since she had already seen it.

No surprise, I absolutely loved it. Fantastic writing (for the most part – I’ll get to that), fantastic acting, and really inventive and evocative directing. I even noticed the directing. That means this movie is pretty dang good. But what really struck me was it’s simplistic setting and characters.

For those who aren’t aware, as it wasn’t a huge film, the story follows a family of three, comprised of a divorced father and his two children, one a daughter in college, another an angsty high schooler, in addition to the bits and pieces from the ex-wife, happily married for three years to some other man. Typical indie fair, but interestingly, all three of the main characters are writers. The father, Bill, is a famous author, with multiple books published and a solid career; the daughter, Sam, is studying creative writing at school while also landing a publishing deal for her first novel, however not under her own name; the son, Rusty is still an aspiring writer, but clearly has talent needing to be developed. He worships Stephen King and writes mystery/thrillers, and she writes what seems to be realistic fiction, possibly for young adults.

This seems to be the bond they all share – that they all write, that they all have a writer’s mind, cultivated by their father. At one point, Rusty’s stepfather mutters that it’s stupid that the kids keep journals and that the father pays them for it in place of them getting a job. Deeply offended, Rusty fights back and then leaves the room, and to be honest, I was with him. Who hasn’t kept a journal at some point?

But, really, the story follows the three in their quest to find love…or, actually, their troubles in love. And for someone who tends to write fiction centered around, or at least concerning love, in all its different forms, I found this a striking and compelling take on love. I deeply identified with this movie, even though “Advanced Creative Fiction” would never be a lecture and you’d most definitely know everyone in your class, an inaccuracy I found to be really strange given the rest of the material in the movie. I also marveled at the fantastic writing in itself. It was kind of meta, realizing that a movie about writing was so well written, clearly someone who knew what he was doing.

I thought this until I saw the ending in the movie. Each character had their own conflict relating to love, and for Bill, it was coming to terms with his ex-wife cheating and ultimately leaving him. In an intimate and unexpected moment, he tells Sam that when she was little, he left her mom for some other woman, but for only six months. He came back to her, and he accepted her, and all she asked in return was for him to wait for her if she made a similar, stupid mistake. After three years, he still waits for her, though throughout the movie different people, including his ex-wife, try and convince him otherwise.

As all the other storylines wrapped up, one year from the start of the movie, on Thanksgiving, Bill’s storyline was unfinished. It didn’t feel that way, though, because coming to terms with a loss of love cannot be tied up like the rest of the movie. The true payoff for his honesty with his daughter was her coming to terms with the fact that her mom didn’t just hurt her father, but that they had hurt each other. She had idolized her father and hated her mother for hurting him, and through Bill’s honesty realized her idolization – but not love – had been misplaced, and her anger had been wrong. Sam’s forgiveness of her mother was Bill’s ending storyline too, since he will still struggle with missing his wife.

Or, that is what I thought, until the last scene, at Thanksgiving. Slapped at the end of the movie, there’s a knock at the door right before they start to eat. Who could it be? Please don’t let it be the mother. I wish I had been wrong.

Bill’s ex-wife comes, crying, but not heavily, and embraces him. He hurriedly sets a place for her, and she takes it. Everyone seems truly happy…except me.

For one, it’s incredibly cheesy, which makes it unrealistic. The entire movie I was struck by how realistic the movie made the unrealistic. The lines were a bit pretentious, but why wouldn’t they be, coming from a family of writers? Bill was a bit eccentric, but not anything too drastic, and why would he? He’s a writer. And then there’s the whole college thing, but that’s so minor I would hardly call it unrealistic. But this ending? It seemed like Bill picked up his pen and said “I want this ending, so I’m going to write it this way.”

I was honestly surprised and disappointed that the story had to end this way. It could have ended right before the last scene, and I would have found the ending to be satisfied. A motif throughout the film was Bill waiting for his wife by setting a place for her, but at this Thanksgiving, he set the place for her, then took it away, as he started to see how foolish he was. But then he added it again, because Sam brought her boyfriend – she learned how to love, a direct antithesis to Bill, who learns how to let love go.

I could also envision her coming to Thanksgiving, but with her husband. The movie explored different kinds of love – romantic, companionate, parental, sexual, unconditional – and the addition of the mother, happy and with both her families, would have rounded out the story’s themes nicely. Because not all love is romantic, her addition at the table would have symbolized her commitment to love her ex-husband and her children as a family, even while she does not romantically love her ex-husband anymore.

Obviously, I enjoyed the film, but I’ve been thinking a lot about endings lately, with Star Wars: The Force Awakens ending the way it did (post forthcoming, obviously), as well as reading Hannah’s post from last night about the alternate ending for Pride and Prejudice (which I had NO IDEA about and now my mind is blown). So I’m not sure if I hate the movie because I hate the cheesy ending, or I love the movie but will pretend the ending doesn’t exist? I really don’t know what to do with it, and I definitely don’t understand how a well-written, innovative movie could have such an oversight, even it comes from studio executives or producers who wanted their way.

Either way, I’m puzzled, but it’s a good way to learn, as a writer…how not to end your movie.