Trishanku Self Reflective Essay

                           Self-Reflective Process Essay

                                                         

                                                                           -Trishanku Bhuyan(S173G0015)

                                                                             M.A. Film Studies (SCCE)

The Ways of Reading course has been really interesting. As a child I used to enjoy reading fiction but somewhere along the way I stopped reading. Maybe I got preoccupied with other things, well that’s what I liked to tell myself. I always wanted to try my hand at writing even though I wasn’t so sure of myself. So, when I came to know about this elective, I was really excited. I thought maybe through this course I will find the habit of reading fiction back since I always enjoyed a good story. Another thing that was at the back of my mind while joining this course was that it will finally help me to write fiction something that I wanted to try. I guess with the course mandate when it becomes necessary to read certain things and write you tend to do that. At least it is in my case since I tend to put off everything else for later maybe that’s just a bit lazy on my part. I was also pretty excited when during one of our classes it was mentioned that through this course, we would try to read things as writers and which actually helped me a lot. Quite frankly I never read a graphic novel before. I was introduced to Art Speigelman’s Maus through this course which I quite enjoyed. Although my regret is that I couldn’t attend any of the classes where Maus was discussed since I was going through a personal problem.

Some of the things that I learnt from this course was how to best describe things. How even the most mundane and everyday things could be turned interesting through proper description in poetry specially from the class on Mark Doty’s ‘A tremendous fish’. As the course proceeded further towards the mid semester, I tried my hand at poetry. The poems were not that great since to be honest I quite didn’t like what I wrote but since it was the mandate that you had to turn in your work. I submitted whatever I could manage. Throughout this course one important thing that I learnt about writing is that if the writing is personal it feels more real and also gives a quite nice touch. I always had the habit of jumping to the grand narrative without substantiating much with a personal touch. I guess most of my poems lacked from that personal touch even though one of the poems was very personal. I also found the use of line breaks which I wasn’t very good at or even tried much. It actually makes your writing look good and breaks at certain points give an entirely new meaning of its own. I found I had a problem of repetition. I used to repeat a lot of similar words throughout my writing which I still do and trying to work on it. I believe my writing has improved a little after this course but you will be the better judge of that. I am glad that I was introduced to certain literature since I lost touch with reading fiction. It has renewed my love for reading and also have given me a new-found confidence to write however bad the writing maybe. I guess with the right amount of practice and keeping all the feedback in mind I could improve my writing over time. I tried to keep some of the feedback that I received after my mid semester submissions in mind while writing my end semester fiction. I tried to give it a personal touch even though I am not sure if I was successful in bringing that out. All in all, it has been a good experience, I learnt a lot of new things as well as re-learnt ways of reading a text.