Creative writing always comes with hours worth of writers-block for me. Years of literary analysis papers leave me lost when I don’t have to convince my reader of my thesis, when I don’t even need a thesis in the first place. The body of this writing project was a week-long process. I spent an entire Saturday re-reading my favorite South Asian authors, tucking sticky notes in their books for quotes that I wanted to refer back to. Sitting down to write that evening was not fruitful however. I needed more time. I took that week to allow their words to percolate in my head, and returned to the essay after talking with Professor Shapiro. This second time around I had more direction and vision. With creative writing, unlike analytical papers, I find myself doing a lot more micro-editing. I change a word, and then change it back, and then change it once again. I want the words themselves to be beautiful, not merely convincing.

The smaller subsections of my writing project were composed in more of a stream-of-consciousness style. They were intended as a personal chronicle of my inner thoughts and experiences with certain books. I am including them for the public website, but in my mind, they are less polished than the body of the work hopefully reads as.

What was the longest and most time-consuming part of this project was compiling all my disparate pieces of writing into a website format. I have never worked with a medium like WordPress before, so there was a steep learning curve in figuring out this technology. I went through a day’s worth of moving menus, changing backgrounds, and fixing broken hyperlinks. I had not spent so much time on a creative, visual project in a long while and I wanted it to be perfect. The minimalistic template that I ended up choosing after three different versions of the website allows my writing to stand alone and speak for itself.

This project was a unique challenge on multiple accounts. Firstly, I had to probe into my own psyche, asking myself hard questions about identity and my family’s past. I had to write without the helpful guidelines of a thesis or central question. Finally, my choice to incorporate media, something that I am thoroughly incompetent at navigating, gave higher stakes to the whole endeavor. I wanted to create website that I could share with former teachers, with my sisters, my mother, my friends. All together, I truly feel as though I “wrote beyond the classroom”. The normal expectations and limits that three years of academic writing have asked of me were gone and the freedom was exhilarating. I created a project that I am proud to share and one that I hope will be the first step in fulfilling my quiet desire to carve out a corner of the Internet for my own writing.