As I thought more about LandSea, I realized I had eaten lots of good food, and had participated in a really unique experience. I decided then, that the apple would be one part of a bigger theme of food eaten in a new environment. This also gave me room to talk about the Travel part of Food and Travel, and go into much more detail about the places we saw.
The hardest thing for me to deal with in this piece was length. I went way over the word limit. There was just so much I could talk about and every experience seemed important. I knew I couldn’t write every fun and interesting story that happened while I was on my trip, but it was hard to cut certain details that were important to me. For instance, I had an entire paragraph describing each of my patrol-mates. For sixteen days these people had been my closest friends, and together we had experienced a really incredible journey. But despite their friendships being very important to me personally, it did not add much to the theme of my story, and so I had to cut it.
The easiest piece for me to write was the Perfect Meal assignment. I actually began writing it about a week before I ever made my meal. Since the day the assignment was given, I had been trying to imagine what my dinner would be like. My thought process was that maybe this time I would create something really fantastic, and the piece would then center on the idea of friendship. The meal would be made for my friends; it would be a sign of appreciation and love. If it turned out like every other meal I’ve ever tried to make, then I knew I’d have my humor piece. The line, “I wanted to go all out” came to me in the middle of class one day. When I wrote it out at home, it flowed into an entire paragraph about who I would invite, which, at the time, was a dilemma that still needed to addressed.
Once I made my meal, the story basically wrote itself. I could have tried different writing techniques, trying things out of chronological order or including more background information, but telling everything in order just as it happened was simple, and ended up working really well for the piece. My inability to cook and the stress I felt while making the meal was clearly seen by simply telling the story. I just explained what happened and the humor of the situation did the work for me.
Revising this may have been hardest though. The workshop had provided me with good ideas for improvement, but I didn’t know how I could incorporate them into the piece. One of the most common remarks was that I needed to characterize the people in the story more. For some of my friends, I had stories and details about them that would do this well. But I couldn’t find a way to add them without disrupting the flow of the story. And since I was so proud of my writing and liked the story a lot, it was difficult for me to displace anything. I liked how everything fit and even though I wanted more, I didn’t want to sacrifice what I had already established. For some of my friends, I couldn’t characterize them at all. These are people I spend every day with, and yet I couldn’t find the words to make them unique. This was extremely frustrating. I’ve had this problem before in other writing classes. I have a really difficult time characterizing people who are close to me. I know my friends and family, but I don’t know how to show the reader who they are. I’m always afraid I won’t do them justice.
The restaurant review assignment was the hardest for me to write. The word limit stressed me out the most. Knowing how hard it is for me to delete sections that I like, I was constantly checking my word count. I wouldn’t even start an idea if I knew it was going to be too long. I had ten courses to get through, so each word had to be chosen carefully. Despite being my shortest piece, it took me the longest to write because of this.
Another thing that was difficult for me was how to incorporate my voice into the piece. Being written for the New York Times, I couldn’t write this in the more carefree tone that I wrote my first two in. Unlike the previous assignments, I found myself constantly changing words and phrases because they did not sound professional enough. And yet, I couldn’t be completely absent from the piece either. This was my review and my opinion, so I still needed to be there. Somewhere. Having never taken a journalism class before, this was a new type of writing for me, and it was difficult at the start. It helped that I had the later due date. Looking at what my classmates and written helped give me an idea of how I should write mine.
Despite the difficulty of the word constraint, the comments I received were the easiest to add to this piece in revision. Once I deleted the small paragraphs of each course of the meal, I had more room to describe some of the more memorable dishes in detail. I was also more willing to move certain sections around to include their comments about dividing up descriptions of food and place. This was still hard though. I tried to interrupt the food descriptions as best I could, but the piece is still pretty much divided into a description of the place and then a description of the food. I was happy with the chronological order of the meal though. I thought I should present it to the reader the way it had been presented to me. So that was one comment from classmates that I chose to ignore.
Having taken Creative Writing and Creative Non-Fiction Writing, I felt experienced and confident in my ability as a writer coming into this class. I thought this would be more of a chance for me to fine tune skills I had already developed. But Food And Travel Writing taught me about yet another style of writing. I did not realize coming into this class how much more I had to learn. It was very fun and exciting to experience this, and I feel I have grown a lot as a writer because of this class.
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