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The TENDERFOOT
DESCRIPTION Highly experimental in form, this story traces the dissolution of a relationship. It alternates between scenes from the narrator's present and moments from their past, building an emotional arc that moves from love to loss to loneliness to resolution. Formatting is intentionally minimalistic, with thoughts, words, and descriptions flowing together to force the reader to engage closely with the text.Loosely inspired by my own life, this was a story that felt therapeutic to write, and I consider it my most ambitious, if not most coherent, piece of fiction.
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REVISIONS Initially, this story included only scenes from the past. After Professor Barron suggested, however, that there needed to be something grounding these scenes, I decided to include moments in the present as well, and made the piece about how memories continue to affect us in the present. Adding these new scenes forced me to restructure my entire piece, but also made it significantly stronger.
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DESCRIPTION Written with what I envisioned as being Hemingway-esque simplicity, this is a short story that describes two brothers going sledding. Unlike my later fiction work, this piece relies almost entirely on objective description, and does not account for characters' thoughts or motivations. My hope is that those things are self-evident through actions and dialogues. Though simpler than the other fiction I've written, this is my personal favorite piece. I believe the reason it turned out the way it did is because I was reading more fiction during high school than I did in college—a testament to how important it is to have models of writing.
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REVISIONS This was one of those miraculous pieces of writing that emerged in its first draft fairly complete. I made only minor tweaks to the story following my initial submission to Professor Barron and a peer writing group, cutting a section or two and adding greater detail to change the focus of other sections. Though it is similar to the final draft, the rough draft can be read below.
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DESCRIPTION Probably the most conventional piece of fiction I have written, this is a story about tension and resentment in a Polish family. At the time I wrote this piece, it was the longest work of fiction I had ever made, which is part of the reason I was hesitant to deviate from a traditional narration pattern. Still, I decided to use first person as a means of exploring memory, a theme that recurs in my later fiction and also in my academic work (isn't thinking about the past, and how everyone interprets it differently, fascinating?). I see this piece as a marker of my beginnings as a creative writer.
Attempts at Fiction
For most of my life, I liked the idea of becoming an author. I might be the next huge commercial success, like J.K. Rowling, or a literary genius ahead of my time, like Zora Neale Hurston. But, in one way or another, I was going to write a book, and it was going to be great.
With this ambition in mind, I signed up for a fiction writing class with Professor Paul Barron. Up to then, my experience with writing fiction was limited to just one piece I wrote for my AP English class, and I knew I needed to be a little more practiced before creating my masterpiece.
I quickly realized that creating fiction is hard, and that it doesn't come as intuitively to me as other forms of writing. But I found a lot of value in what I was doing; attempting to do fiction made me more thoughtful about pacing and description in my writing, and made my nonfiction better as a result.
Below, I have included both the piece I wrote in high school and the two long submissions I made for my class at Michigan. For the latter two pieces, I also include links to my earlier drafts, to show how my work changed thanks to peer reviews and comments from Professor Barron. Each piece is a little different; to find one that sounds interesting, you can refer to the short descriptors to the side of each story.
As You Were, As I Am
The Pipe Maker