Emily Fishman

When thinking about my piece to repurpose and take another pass at, I kept coming back to an article I’d written for the Daily about my perceived lack of creativity. I was trying to go for a snarky tone, as I thought people would obviously understand that me writing a creative piece about my lack of creativity was funny. It’s ironic, get it? I don’t think anyone got it, and I think more and more that I was trying to hide behind the irony to avoid dealing with the actual creative deficit that I felt. I returned to the piece to get in the middle of what I actually felt about my supposed “crisis of creativity.”

 

My initial draft tried to do too many things. Like, way too many things. Inspired by a call for structure, I wrote my own Stylebook with terms and their usage pertaining to my life, These were meant to tell the narrative of what had happened and help the audience understand some of the reflection that I had on that crisis. The tone was still kind of wry and less sincere than I initially hoped it would be.

 

To solve that problem, I tried to explicate the different sections through bits of prose at the end of each section, explaining the sequence of events in a traditional narrative. But, that felt purposeless and the sincerity of those pieces didn’t match the tone. The next try was to have a prose explanation entirely at the end and intentionally fill it with errors for the Stylebook to correct. Confused? I was too.

 

Eventually, when looking at options for my remediation and thinking about how I was going to make these snarky terms fit with sincere prose, it seemed to make the most sense to just sever the terms from the prose explanation all together. This allowed to me to have more robust prose and say something that was actually worth saying about what I had experienced.

 

The question was, then, what to do with these terms that I had poured over for so long. My initial thinking was along the lines of the correctable prose from before, and I figured I could make a fake publication, provide the terms, and then edit the whole thing with said terms. That didn’t feel quite right for a few reasons (least of all that I had no idea how I was going to accomplish that), including the fact that I wasn’t sure what a new piece of prose would even say, or what the corrections would then be for. I know this is getting complicated, but hang in there, it’s all coming together soon.

 

Since I knew my repurposing and my remediation would both be about what it felt like for me to write and how I felt about writing, in typical Emily fashion I started to panic a little about what, if anything, I was going to have left to say in the “why I write” piece. Then, it was clear that all three fit together. The optimistic view of the situation, the pessimistic view that tore into everything the optimist believed and urged it to be better, and the realist view, which sought to determine why I’d even stick with the writing thing.

 

The optimist, the pessimist, the realist. Three sides of my personality that I think are captured perfectly in this portfolio. Well, almost perfectly. The self-critical side of me is stronger than I’d like to admit. Working on these three documents has been a process (memorialized here in my process notes, get it?) and I feel like I’ve learned so much about who I am as a writer. Thanks for taking the time to read this far, and I am hopeful that you’re walking away thinking about your identity as much as I have over the course of this class.

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