Useful tips from the "King" of advice

I found the second portion of Stephen King's memoir On Writing to be extremely influential and helpful to myself as a writer. Not only did I find his humorous style on writing refreshing and blunt but there was also specific writing tips that stuck out to me and that I will definitely use in writing and revising my memoir. I found the portion on description to be the especially helpful information because I tend to over describe things often. King advised that there was such a thing as over describing and under describing and each was equally detrimental to one's writing. There is a level to which you should describe a setting and people up to and after that you have to let your readers' imagination take over. Even if you as a writer remember all of the minor details of a place, the multiple smells, sounds, sights and maybe even tastes, you must evaluate which details are significant enough to your story to include. For instance if I was to talk about my sorority in my memoir (as I am) I would not need to go over every single relationship that I've made through it, or every detail in a single experience that I'm describing. If I were to keep reiterating the numerous details surrounding the bonfire that my memoir starts out describing, the smell of burning wood, hot chocolate and cold fall ear and the sounds of coyotes howling in the distance and silent tears of understanding from the girls listening to each other as the candle passed around, the reader would probably get bored and give up on reading. Likewise if I simply said there was a bonfire and didn't explain any details to why it is significant to the story the reader would wonder why I put it there. This portion on description in King's book really made me think about stories and what is necessary and what is not necessary to include in the telling of them.

Memoir Ideas

I have thought long and hard about a couple of ideas I could cover with my memoir, trying to find something that is significant but not a sap story is not an easy task. But here is what I've come up with:

1. Two years ago when I first started attending Oakland University I was intrigued by the thought of joining a sorority. A friend in my rhetoric 150 class had encouraged me to go through sorority recruitment and I had somewhat reluctantly agreed to follow through. I never thought that I would join a sorority, nor did I think that it would impact me in two years as much as it has. I remember the first time I realized that the sorority meant a lot to me and this was when we had our first fall retreat. I had no voice during the retreat and so I wasn't able to socialize as much as I would have liked to, but when we sat around the campfire and talked about our reasons for joining I had started crying and realized how much I needed a new stable community in college. Since then the sorority has been able to provide this for me.

This option is very recent so I'm not sure if it is the best for this assignment but I have a lot of trouble recalling early childhood memories in detail. So the next option is fairly recent as well.

The Birth of a New & Improved Writer

After reading the excerpts on Strunk & White's writing guide The Elements of Style, I realized that I may have made every mistake that Strunk and White described in the chapter "An Approach to Style". Lately I've been noticing that I've become accustomed to writing with an overabundance of words, the reason for this being that I enjoy words and often want to wrap my sentences up in the prettiest little bow, hoping that someone will want to unwrap the gift I've presented them with. It is very hard for me to cut down my sentences because I always think that each part of it is just as important as the next. However I think that Strunk and White were onto something when they touched on the topic of clarity, and how it is your job as a writer to be clear to your readers, to cause them as little strife in reading your piece as you can. I realize a big part of being clear is by using as little words as you need to.
I still think that having a wide vocabulary at your disposal is useful when writing, and in the right contexts using extra words for emphasis or painting a specific picture can be necessary. But, on the whole, I think that extra words should be used as little as possible because our main purpose is to inform our readers and we don't want our audience to feel as if they had to dig for so long before finding something useful in our writing. It made me laugh when Strunk and White mentioned the phrase "the fact that" and said that it was a phrase that should be "revised out of every sentence in which it occurs" because I know that this is a phrase I use way too often.
I hope after this course that I can learn a little bit more (if not a lot) about myself as a writer and what it will take to bring my writing to the next level. I hope I can learn to be more clear with my writing and how to use words that flow together better instead of just throwing a ton of words down on a page and hoping my reader doesn't notice that I did that in an attempt to distract them from "the fact that" (see I did it again) I didn't know what I was saying.

Reflection on Annie Dillard's Write Till You Drop

Annie Dillard's Write Till You Drop has awakened an urge to write inside me that has been asleep for a long time. Though I love the art of writing and the beauty of the English language I rarely take the time to sit down and write anything, simply because I do not think that I have much to say. I know that their are things inside of my head that I wish to display to the world through writing but I have yet to fish them out. The way Annie described this process of "fishing out your inner thoughts" was perfect, she said that the sensation of writing is like spinning. This metaphor was both poetic and accurate to me because I usually find that when I sit down and try to write it takes me a while to start but once I do I feel like my thoughts keep circulating faster and faster and before I know it I look down to see an abundance of words with an unknown origin. This piece by Annie Dillard has not only excited me for this semester in ENG 380, but also for my personal writing excursions.