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For the something we have crafted ourselves, I chose an origami chomper (like a Pac-Man) I made in year 9. I have a box full of them because my friend and I decided we would try to make one hundred of them. I googled the instructions and followed the steps on each fold to end up with the final product. I didn’t know how this related to my writing at first, but I thought about it more and realised how organised, and planned out I am. Like following origami instructions, I write out a plan for the entire story, so I know every detail before going into it. This way, I can reference anything from characters pasts or foreshadow future moments because I already worked everything out. This task opened me up to how I go about writing, and that I rather a step-by-step plan, rather than writing straight off the bat.

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Writing in the same style as a classmate was really good to open myself to new ways of writing and how to make it (potentially) better. The piece I ended up writing was basically in the same style I always write in, because my partner and I write relatively similarly in the idea we use characters inner thoughts and dialogue, except i don't rely on that. So in my piece leant heavily into dialogue to progress the story, and let character narration offer information about the past which is similar to what my partner did in her own work. Since I usually write in a lot of detail, specifically describing setting a lot, I didn’t do that and let it be revealed by the characters and what they’re doing instead, which – I think – made the piece flow better as the scene was gradually built up through the characters conversing.

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In the ACMI exhibit last week, I really liked the Marilyn Monroe display because of how iconic it is. How one performance has travelled across generations to empower women is an incredible thing.
But this week, we wrote a short piece based on an image given to us by a classmate. Thinking about both the photo and the meaning of the exhibition, I wrote about the costume and created a powerful character in a world that doesn't appreciate women with power.
This is a snippet of the piece below:

I’d never seen anyone quite like the woman in the doorway. Her hair is loosely braided out of her face, with loose strands breezing in front of her natural eye lashes. But I had barely looked at her face, for my eyes fell straight to her pants. I was never allowed to wear them, and I never will be allowed. But seeing the woman in the doorway in her beige pants made me feel like I could do anything. I could tear the pins out of my hair. I could wipe the make-up off my face. I could hang my robes up forever. I could walk the streets with my chin up. I could say no to the men taking my hand. I could be the woman in the doorway. I could wear pants.

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Listening to this week’s lecture enlightened me to a new meaning of culture I hadn't considered before, which was sparked by the question 'how do you do culture?'. Things we do every day are considered how we 'do' culture, so I chose listening to music. It’s something I do every single day, and something I enjoy doing. When I’m writing, I’m always playing music and it sometimes inspires me if I hear a good line.

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The task in which we had to write a 200 word piece in 50 words was intimidating, and time consuming. But the challenge of coming up with a comprehensible passage was exciting. I enjoyed writing it but found it sounded a lot like I was dot-pointing my work because I happened to use a lot of short sentences. But sometimes they're good because you can get straight to the point, and sometimes the wordy descriptions of setting and character aren't needed because they can be interpreted through things characters say and do later on.
This is the piece below.

I had been sitting for an hour, sipping the drink on the table. I laughed at her dancing, and laughed more when she laid on the ground. But I had been sipping more than the drink on the table. I danced to her and laid on the ground. We laughed more than we had been laughing all night. We had been sipping drinks hours before and could see the night sky dancing. She grabbed my hand and laughed an ‘I love you’. I laughed an ‘I love you’ back.
We laid on the ground, looking at the night sky for seemingly an hour. We sat up before the drinks wore off. More than the ground was dancing when we looked up. We laughed at the dancing night sky, the dancing table of drinks. I stood up off the ground, and grabbed her hands to pull her up, but she laid back down. I laughed more. I grabbed her hands again to pull her up, and she stood.

We danced back to the table, sitting and sipping more drinks. I laughed and she told a friend she loves them. She sipped more of her drink. I smiled. We danced all night.

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Despite having to eavesdrop random peoples conversations, the task of developing real dialogue into something you might see in a novel was really good. The below dialogue is what the pairs conversation was, with some additional sentences to make it make somewhat more sense. The exercise of deleting every third word really narrowed this piece down to the basics of what exactly was important, which is a good way to write especially when here's a word count, and also let one know that not everything is vital to the story. This is the edited dialogue of two people with some inferred lines:

“I’m aware. I can tell what people are like.”

“It’s hard to think like that, it stops you from trying to have conversations.”

“And I’m not social either.”

“Where do you live?”

“Ascot Vale.”

“What was it like? What did you study?”

“I studied science. I took a gap year after.”

“So did I!”

“I met a lot of people. It was nice not worrying about anything. I could just be me.”

“I felt the same way.”

“I went to Bali, and it was so annoying when I wanted to buy something, and they’re charging me triple.”

“I hate when they do that!”

“Do you see my face? I’m not paying triple.”

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Safety Last
1. Summary
A man climbs a building to impress a girl, but encounters several issues on his way up when his friend is being chased by a policeman.

2. Protagonist
Harold, the man climbing the building.

3. Antagonist
the building, as it constantly throws new obstacles at Harold that he must survive.

4. Three plot points.
- Starts climbing the building.
- Police start to chase his friend and Harold has to keep climbing.
- He makes it to the top of the building.

5. Describe the sites of conflict
- He slips on his way to the first floor.
- Police chase his friend so Harold must keep climbing.
- Painters unintentionally push Harold further away from the building by a plank
- Harolds' friend flips the window with Harold on it.
- Harold falls and holds onto the clock hands that almost snap off.
- Harold grabs an untied rope that his friend barely manages to catch
- Harold bangs his head on the ledge when being pulled up.
- Harold hits his head on the wind things.
- Harold loops his ankle through a cord and swings back and forth.

6. Final turning point
- Either Harold getting the girl or Harold almost falling but surving because he's attatched to the rope.

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The task to write about an inflatable flamingo using a creative writing method made me think about what actually goes into writing, and what we should think about when writing. I chose character for this piece because the flamingo isn't alive and I wanted to create an almost human-like element to it.
My writing piece was essentially a diva flamingo in the jungle, and it was hanging out in the water watching zebras running around.
With a short description of what the flamingo was doing, and his thoughts, I'd already created a personality, that added character to the character. If conflict were developed, readers would begin to wonder what would happen to the character, and possibly sympathise with him.
This is the start of my piece:

The gentle bubbling of crystal-clear water balanced out the fiery breeze washing through their feathers. The perfect temperature ratio on the perfect day. Juliana was telling him every detailed he could have possibly needed about Franco and Genies’ secret relationship – God he was lucky. He wasn’t close enough with the forbidden couple to get the scoop, so Julianas’ information was the next best thing – and she told the story pretty damn well.

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Writing a list of our top ten most recent books we've read, and labelling them let me know I read a lot of the same books. Majority were books I had to read in high school last year, so there was a lot of variety from past authors to present authors, those born in Australia and those not. But excluding those, I generally read the same type of books, written by women, and a fantasy/mystery genre.
Expanding to different genres would open me to new experiences and I might like them better than what I am reading. As everyone writes different, it would be interesting to see what other authors writing styles are, and see what techniques they use in their writing that I could adopt in my own.

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We edited a practice piece of writing in class in preparation for the peer editing assignment. As a piece with a lot of mistakes, it made it easy to point out things that sounded wrong, but also to notice things that I wouldn't do in my own writing, because it confuses the structure, or doesn't make sense following the story.
Additionally, sharing our corrections with other people in class helped to locate even more things wrong with the piece so i can then apply those to my own writing. The lecture this week also let me know that there were more things to edit than just grammar, for example, you can suggest merging two paragraphs if it makes more sense to, and vise versa.

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'Golden beams of sunshine shy away any shadow in the vibrant green garden. Through the gap in the top of the trees, the gleaming sun ignites her face with a dash of warmth until her body swings back down and up the other way to look at the gently swaying grass below her. Her dress billows through the wind as the sun greets her face again, and her eyelids display a fiery dance from the light stretching toward her.'

In this lecture activity, I chose three images on Pinterest and wrote about one that had a girl in a dress on a swing, in a garden/forest. I took this activity as an opportunity to develop imagery and practice describing a scene that might come across in the same way I saw the image chosen.

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"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." -  John Steinbeck

This quote describes the time from being in writers block or generally just being clueless about a story, to slowly forming a couple good ideas. Once those few ideas are written down, you gradually start to ease into the world you're creating and start coming up with good plot points that moves your story forward. As you keep going, these ideas start coming without a lot of thought until there's dozens of thoughts and a million different paths your characters can take.

I chose this quote because it's relatable to all writers and something like lacking inspiration for a piece of writing is common. But we understand the relief of finally getting back into the mood to write and stepping back into the world created before us. This quote refers to the reproductive ways of rabbits and turns it into something funny and something relatable.