Experience With Reading Task And Writing Difficulties

Experience with Writing Difficulties
Joshua Montgomery
English Composition I
10/1/2017
Writing has never been my cup of tea. I have never understood how people generate ideas, turn them into appropriate words that communicate meaning and then put them on paper. It is amazing how people create virtual characters and try to make them seem real to the audience. How the plot is developed is just puzzling. I am not insinuating, however, that I am not a good writer. What am saying is that I am a good student. A good student who is open-minded can easily learn and become better.
I had learnt how to write letters, reports, research papers until one day our instructor told us to locate some short story books from the online library. After reading and comprehending, we had to come up with our own. To me, this seemed like a mountain ahead. I'd prefer writing something that is real, something like a letter or a notice that addresses someone directly. It is real, but this world of fantasy was not my thing. I did as instructed and located a book from the online library. I remember reading it overnight.
The book had a collection of different stories written by different authors. The stories were captivating and amazing. I could, not, however, as much as I tried, come up with my own. The temptation of paraphrasing one of the stories was imminent. To me, this was creativity. As I look back, I realize that it could have been creativity in something else for instance in science or engineering but not in literature.
So, I took my laptop and started typing. By the third day I had finished up, and I went through it to satisfy myself that it was pretty cool. I uploaded it to my instructor, and a few days later the comments came. The first comment was that my story was too long. Short stories, before they become acceptable, have to be trimmed. It had to be tight; each word in each sentence had to bear weight (Arkady, 2017). I had written a lot of unnecessary words.
The story must have a plot. Mine didn’t. This was the second comment. This made me go back to my story and then to the internet to search the meaning of the word ‘plot' in a story. I came to realize, I had written an atmospheric piece with marvelous details, but nothing was happening. I had not talked about something in specific. The characters I had developed were all static including the events too; nothing was moving. All that I focused on is to put down sophisticated bombastic words.
The pace was another vital factor I had difficulty putting in my work. Had it have happened that I posted my work to my audience, they could have gotten to almost the third-last page before things started happening. I took too long to start developing events and making them flow. I also came to notice that I cared less about what happened to my main character. The instructor's remark was "Why to kill the main character already?” I came to learn that I had to make the main character engaging such that was it a book with a collection of short stories; a reader wouldn’t have left it and moved to the next story.
Going through my work with relation to the instructor's comments, I learnt that my writing has to be audience-oriented and not just personal writings. Some of the recommendations the instructor wrote on my work were that at first, I had to make some short points of what I am going to talk about in the story. It had to communicate some meaning. Secondly, after I write, instead of just posting it immediately to him, I should consider an exercise he termed as peer review. To explain further, he said that I should indulge my peers in my writing. After writing, I should give them my work to review and make comments. I should as well take theirs to review their work and make comments. Through that process, I will ...