Call for Papers: Discovering Myself as a Writer

          For this reflective blog post, I would really like to elaborate on my writing process. In documenting our writing processes during class for our responses to the Calls for Papers, I realized that my writing process has always been the same. I have even wondered if changing my writing process and switching things up would make me a better, more creative, structured writer. Nevertheless, in regards to my current writing process, writing an introduction to any piece of work has always been the hardest part of an essay for me. Finding ways to creatively set a tone in the beginning of papers has always been more difficult in my opinion because simply stating what I'm going to talk about has never seemed like much of an attention-grabber, but more of a boring approach. However, once setting the tone in the first paragraph, it normally becomes easier to efficiently write the rest of the paper. I frequently use an online thesaurus to avoid using specific words repeatedly, as I feel this makes my writing less appealing; I also try to avoid using words that are too difficult to comprehend, words that people rarely use, as this also is a deterrent for most readers. When I wrote my response to the Force of Fiction, the flashcards we wrote on during class were my main guide to writing my response because I focused all of my flashcards on that specific call for papers. What took the most time when writing that response was organizing the flashcards in a way that made sense for the response so that the information used wasn't completely random. Lastly, of any essay of course, is the conclusion which typically sums up the essay as a whole. This is also a hard part of writing any essay to me because I have a hard time restating the thesis without sounding so repetitive. So instead, for this response to the Force of Fiction, I decided to end with an idea, but I do feel as if my conclusion could have been a lot stronger to sum up my paper and make it more interesting.