Writing or Writing

As I continue to work on my writing memory, I can feel myself changing gears and the way I understand and interact with this piece.  Originally, it was just an in class exercise, similar to countless other in class exercises I've done, a scribbled down account of some dusty memory, jumbled up and only half remembered.  While talking through what I'd written, new details oozed out of cranial crevices (stickers of crazy bloody shot eyes, twist ties, Cat's Eye).  As I went back and typed up the memory, expanded it out and then edited it back, I could feel the shapeless cloud of the original memory solidify into a mass of details and feelings.  It became a mass crafted and given form by the words set onto the page.

My writing process.

Now, I had a sense of white this piece was, what it would turn out to be.  It was just an account of something that happened to me.  I'd been writing stuff like this since Mrs. Powers's first grade class.  When we went back to these drafts in pairs, I got my draft back with comments like, "show don't tell," "love this image," and "be more specific."  I was surprised, not because I was unfamiliar with that kind of feedback, but because I was so accustomed to seeing those exact phrases on my fiction pieces.  Something clicked.  After that, I thought about the draft differently.  It jumped the gap between my Teaching/English Literature classes and my Creative Writing classes, landing squarely in the land of creative non-fiction.