Anu Raj Rana(s173len05) - Self-reflective Essay

I had always wondered that how did deadlines and prompts work with creative process. Also, another big dilemma was whether there any techniques to writing because I had held a very rough idea about writing and used to feel that one’s skills and style are engrained in them and any effort to mould it any differently was going to hinder the passion. But what I unraveled was quite different.

Firstly, the course taught me that to become a good writer one had to become a very attentive reader. What did the punctuations, enjambments, breaks mean in the poem was something revealing to me. Earlier I had treated them as part of some formal structure that a particular poem ascribed to, but now I understand that these a break could signify hesitation, silence, embarrassment, a passage of time and many such things that forms  impressions on the mind other than a literary beauty. These things also help the author to produce the desired effect in the readers mind and delineate its sense among other possible meanings of the text.

Second thing that I learnt was the value of rewriting your work and editing it.  I was a sloppy writer earlier and after a point I used to hasten and complete the work inefficiently because the idea of revisiting the entire text for its full impression as a reader seemed a bit tiring to me.  I have learnt the value of this process and found out that a lot of underdeveloped themes and ideas prevailed in the book. Rewriting my own work made me extremely confident and made me realize the value of balance in a text because my work in part was very intensive while at

This was the first time that I ever gave time to graphic novels in my lifetime. I was impressed by the techniques and creativity of this form. How a certain visual representation could tell the intricate value of time was intriguing. Graphic storytelling was something with its own realm of experimentation, one could introduce new techniques in a graphic novel and still expect the readers to notice the ne variations and make sense of it. While there can be certain of verbal and written art, for example when it comes to censorship, a comic or graphic representation might cleverly devise tactics to convey sensitive political issues. In the novel Munnu, a boy from Kashmir, the representation of the tense political scenario and how it has choked the routine and happiness of domestic life of the people of Kashmir come out clearly with the anecdotes shared by a Kashmiri stag and his son. These helps to reduce sensitivity of the issue while retaining the political intent of the work. So, the moral was to devise new techniques when it came to censorship and not quit by discounting the subject matter due to its volatile nature.

I gained insight into the politics of the language in a text. A novel like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, clearly demarcates the languages used by different sections of society in Ayemenem. In a country like India, it becomes important to ascribe importance to the power relations a language reflects among the different sections of a society because English has been a language associated with social mobility here. In spite of being a multi-lingual county we are hold English as the language of power and the educated class.

Most educational was having to write with a prompt and within a limited time which made me patient with ideas entering my head, filtering what was important and not. And the fact that feelings and themes can be expressed more adequately by placing them in a proper structure and using a suitable style foretelling the story. To go back to one’s own writing and consider it like a reader, and revising it to make a thematically and structurally rich text is one of the most important things I learned in this course. And even more important, is the method of storytelling and how each method comes with a whole new range of possibilities since there are many number of forms in writing.