Midwinter Writing Festival

This year was a first time when I attended Midwinter Writing Festival, and to be honest, it exceeded my expectations. I really wanted to participate in each session, but because of my work schedule, I could make it only after 2 p.m. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve decided to go to “Showing vs. Telling” session, read by Matthew Mauch. Going there, I hoped (deep in my heart) that it would help me to make my writings livelier.

Mr. Mauch started his session with a proposal to draw some things: vegetation, landscaping vegetation, perennial plants, decorative flowers, tulips, and a Purple African Queen tulip. As we were told later, all of these drawings were his example of the abstraction ladder. The first four are abstract meanings that describe classes, qualities, ideas, and usually are used for telling. The last two are specific and concrete meanings that actually describe things the way you can see them, touch them, taste, feel and hear them, which are used for showing. The speaker was teaching us that for being successful in writing, we need to use showing 90% of the time in writings (the middle part), and only 10% should be left for telling (introduction and ending). He also gave us tips on how to achieve this goal: avoid plurals, adjectives and adverbs, use concrete nouns and verbs, and recreate the situation that led to the original idea.

                Professor Mauch is a brilliant instructor, and I admire his teaching techniques. It was pleasure to attend his session, and to see him again. The time had passed like a minute, but it was enough for me to understand that I have many things that I need to work on. 

The Music of Figurative Language

Walters & Kazha "The War Is Not Over"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LizZvlBdsHA&NR=1

"The war is not over"

I slowly walk into the night arround
To see how dreams of people die
They gently fall from windows all around
And crash against the ground like glass
And I’m so sorry I’m so helpless in this angry world
If only I could change it for one day

Refrain
The war is not over everyone knows it
It’s just a reason to make us believe 
That someone’s the loser someone’s the winner
To make us believe that’s the way it should be
But I don’t wanna believe

In the story they all tell this fairytail has gone to far
I take a step and dare myself to be free
To see how beautiful we are that everyone can be a star
If only we would start believe in dreams
Believe in who we are


A simile - "And crash against the ground like glass"


Personification - "To see how dreams of people die
                           They gently fall from windows all around"

                           "angry world"

Alliteration - "They gently fall from windows"

                    "If only we would start believe in dreams"

How the Assignment Can Give You Strength to Do Something

Do you remember me saying that this winter I've become an addict to snowkiting? Well, lets say that it took me a while to finally start riding and controlling the kite. There were a few quite unpleasant falls, but if you want to be good at something, you need to sacrifice something (in my case it was my face). Even though by the end of December I was making huge progress, there still was one thing that I wanted to try but didn't have enough guts for that. That is why I knew exactly what I was doing for my 1101 assignment.

Thursday of January 20^th was going to become the turning point in my snowkiting experience: I was going to try jumping. I got up at 6 a.m., not being able to stay in bed even for one more minute. I checked the winter speed on www.weather.com; I saw that it was going to blow that day, and not just blow, but it was supposed to be up to 20 mph (such a great number to see for a snowkiter). I was so excited that even my fiancé and our cat had to get up because my excitement was contagious. So, I’d decided to make my plan a reality on Medicine Lake (Plymouth).

By 10.00 I couldn't stay home any longer, so I packed all my gear in the car, got dressed, and at 11.30 I already was at my point of destination. It took me some time to prepare the kite and the snowboard. So, I was standing there, almost in the middle of the lake, feeling how the wind and cold were making my cheeks numb, but I didn't really care. In my thoughts I was already jumping, and flying, and hovering as a bird. I put my helmet on and took the bar in my hands. It was time to try something new. I lay down on the ground, waiting for a gust of wind to take my kite up in the blue sky. Few moments later, I felt how I was being lifted, and I stood up on my feet. “What now?” I thought while I was riding down wind, calling up all my strength to finish what I had started. I positioned the kite at 11 o’clock, turned my bar in the opposite side from the direction I was going, and then quickly put the bar in a starting position. When I suddenly appeared to by 10 feet above the ground, I realized that it was not that hard to jump, how it was going to be to land. This thought stroked me right in my head like lightning, and for a moment I panicked. Few seconds later I found myself laying on the ground, but at least I knew that it was not scary, that I knew what I was doing, and that I was dying to try it again! A few more tries with landing on my tooshy, back, or head had made their job. By the end of the fourth hour of trying I was finally able to jump high and to land on my snowboard without falling down.

So, that is my story of trying something I've never done before. There is only one thing that I want to tell you. When you are up in the sky, you don’t care about anything else; all your troubles go away. All you can think about is how amazing the flying feels, and that you don’t want to lose this feeling. 

Easy Distracted, or the Most/Least Successful Thing

I prefer to think that the most successful work is going to be written in future, and I don’t have any for now. All of my writings start like they are future disasters. I can’t decide what the topic I should write about. Then I can’t “create” a worthwhile introduction. I get distracted all the time. In the middle of the writing I feel inexpugnable desire to check my mail, or new comments on Facebook, or suddenly I need to eat something… So how am I supposed to write something successful in such unhealthy conditions? J

Not That Much of a Writer, or My Typical Day

I can’t tell that I use a lot of writing in my life. At least for now... I would rather communicate with a person than text him or her. However, I’ve been writing a lot of e-mails to my friends from Belarus lately. All of them at once have decided to send me enormous e-mails with lots of questions, and everybody expects to get an answers. Also, I had three on-line classes last term, and one of them (Children’s Literature) required a lot of work and a lot of writing (it was totally worth it though!). I guess that is all I can say about my “typical day of writing”. 

My Thank You, or a Turning Point in My Understanding of Writing

I’d never thought about myself as a writer before I started taking composition classes… It’s more like I had been writing because I needed to. Moreover, I didn’t like writing in English at all, and I always tried to avoid this unpleasant for me process.

It’s so easy for me to write in Russian: the vocabulary is very rich, grammar and punctuation are perfect. But when it comes to English language, my writings are kind of poor. It’s always hard to use the correct word, and I need to think twice before using it. At least now I enjoy writing in English language, and I want to thank for it my first professor of this class, Mr. Matthew Mauch. He made be believe that I can write, and that my works are not actually that bad.  

Heartbroken, or My Earliest Memory of Writing

I perfectly remember the first time I’d tried to write “something big” (as I thought at that time). I was 9 years old. I spent the entire summer in my grandparents’ summer house.  I was just a careless child who was spending all the time outside with his “summer” friends (all of them were from different places, and usually we didn’t see each other until the next summer). I was “madly” (again, as I thought at that time) in love with a girl 5 years older than me; it was not a surprise that at the beginning of fall I’d decided to write her a love letter and to send it by regular mail. I spent almost two hours writing huge senseless sentences, crossing them out, writing them again, crumpling the letter, throwing it into the garbage bin, taking it out, and rewriting the letter. It was awful, illiterate piece of work, but I was proud of myself when I had finally finished it.

The girl never answered me back…