Week 2 Summary (And Here’s Some Flair For The Title)
The biggest things I did this week were the daily creates and the assignments from the assignment bank. The daily creates threw me at first, but as I started doing them and getting into the swing of it I got more comfortable with them.
The queen one with the eels was hard because I had this whole fairy tale I wanted to tell but got cut short. I feel like the one with the really big book didn’t make a lot of sense, but I committed to it anyway (the joke was the author wrote down every accomplishment that has ever been attributed to “Anonymous” but I feel like it wasn’t clear). Because of the format of a tweet, it lends itself to comedy rather than drama or horror or other genres. It’s the perfect length for the punchline of a joke, since the setup was already done for you.
There was also the works from the assignment bank. I do a lot of writing in my spare time, so I picked a fanfic assignment and a writing assignment. That made the writeups a little more difficult because there wasn’t much to explain. There wasn’t much of a process because I do this all the time, it’s just second nature. I don’t know how to explain it any better than a professional musician would be able to explain how they play their instrument. It just… happens. I get a vibe, I write the vibe, and the vibe exists. Not to say I’m some great writer, I’m not, but it’s the same idea in that it’s second nature. I don’t think about what I’m writing or how I’m doing it, so I couldn’t begin to explain it. When you write about a thousand words for fun on a more or less daily basis, you just do it. You don’t overthink the process.
The audio assignment wasn’t hard, but it was more work and I had to troubleshoot things like my noisy neighbors or the white noise from my heater. I also don’t think the final product was as good as the other two, but that may be because I don’t produce that kind of thing like I do writing. It made the write up easier though. The writeup was the hardest part of all of this because I don’t think about how or why or what I’m making as I’m making it, and once it’s done and I come out of the creativity trance, I have no memory of why I made the decisions I made. It’s like asking someone to explain why some article is the way it is after they’ve read it a few times. I can speculate what I was thinking, but really, I have no idea. I had to write down what I was thinking while I was doing it so I had something to refer back to later, but the interruptions meant that I feel like the final products suffered.
I also tried interacting with the class more. I’m naturally a very shy and reserved person, so writing things like comments with a defined audience is anxiety-inducing, more than something like this where it’s vanishing off into the void. I did try to comment on someone’s creative work for every day here here here here and here. I viewed/listened to/watched/etc. more people’s stuff, but I had too much anxiety to say anything. I also contributed once to the Discord but that one felt weird because I don’t think too many people are on there and those that are don’t seem to say much. I’m not very experienced with Discord, though, so I might just be missing something.
