Response to Classmate's Journal, Week 3

Darin,

I find this free write to have a lot of potential for future drafts. If you chose to expand on this particular writing a suggestion that I would like to make that could potentially make the draft stronger is to go through and highlight and/or circle all the abstractions. I do this all the time and sometimes I amaze myself with how much I can let slip by. Like Dr. Davidson said in class though you have to write it all out first and not think too much. In revision we go back and weed out the least strong of all the images. For example, in your draft you have the line: My heart ached. As we talked about in class, think of how many people have said this and how often. We’ve heard it so many times in poetry, prose, and everyday life that we glaze over and cannot compute what the writer tried to convey. It’s hard to convey pain without using the word “pain” sometimes, but what other ways can we think of pain where the images are more concrete. I was also looking over your calisthenics exercise from this past week and was wondering if you could pull any lines from that into your free entry, such as: “I pound at my clay, I pound the air,
Lugging my bucket back to the noisy clearing.” I wonder if you could use this line and images to portray pain or an aching heart. Maybe another way to portray pain or an aching heart would be to think about the actions that somebody would do if they were feeling this way? Just some things to think about.