Ava Esteves

Storycraft

Professor Furuness

April 30, 2024

Beyond the Classroom

In this Storycraft class, I was tasked to attend a couple of events outside of class time to

learn more about writing. This seemed like a simple opportunity for me, seeing as I am very

involved in the community and like to take advantage of the free and fun events on campus.

Knowing this, I picked two Visiting Writers Series talks to attend. I was limited to on-campus

events, as I did not bring a car to school, but luckily Butler has lots of options. Since life is

constantly changing, one of the events I chose ended up not working with my schedule

anymore, but my feedback group arranged a time to meet and watch a handful of interviews

about writers that we could discuss afterwards.

The first activity in my Beyond the Classroom plan was to attend a session of the Visiting

Writers Series with Leah Johnson. To be entirely honest, there was no reason in particular as to

why I chose to go to Leah’s session specifically besides my own availability and a general

interest in checking out the series. It was a happy coincidence, however, because I found

Leah’s work to be fascinating. She is a black and queer author from Indiana who likes to write

about her own experiences to, as she put it, “fill the gap” in the media with books about those

topics. I thought it was inspiring that she used her talent with words to give kids (she writes

mostly for children and young adults) the reassurance she wished she had about the validity of

her identity. One thing that stuck out to me was how she mentioned that she always has a clear

happy ending after each one of her books. She does this because she believes that her stories

are a promise to the black and/or queer youth that everything will turn out okay in the end. She

said that as someone who has come out on the other side, she views her writing as a message
to those kids. When I heard this, I was both interested and surprised. I thought it was a very

honorable decision, but one that could lead to predictable storylines. The more I thought about it

after leaving the session, I realized that I could take a similar approach to my stories, since I

strongly agree with the message, but I could do it in my own way. Maybe the character doesn’t

necessarily get the girl or win the game or beat whatever obstacle was in their way, but they can

still maybe find an unexpected happy ending elsewhere in acceptance. I enjoy shaking up the

ending of my stories so as to not fall into a predictable cycle, but Leah Johnson’s session made

me think about tying the ending into a nice bow, regardless of what that means plot-wise. As far

as what questions I still have, I want to learn how to tell stories with aspects that I haven’t lived

through. Most of Leah’s stories were about young black queer women, which makes sense

because that is who she is and what she knows most about, but I am curious to learn how to tell

some other stories, which is something that maybe will be answered in a future Visiting Writers

Series session.

The second activity I did was to meet with my feedback group to discuss a collection of

interviews. The video had interviews with five different writers, but two of them stuck out to me.

The first was with Anne Rice, who used to write fantasy vampire novels but switched to

Christian literature. She had a very intense switch in content, but what I thought was most

surprising is that she still respects and accepts her previous work. I would have assumed that

she would be regretful or judgemental towards her old self, and I saw some parallels to myself

in my own writing. Of course, the situation with Anne Rice was much more extreme, but

sometimes I look through my old writings and hate what I see. I am embarrassed that my old

self ever thought that the trash on the page was good writing. I think I can learn from Anne Rice

to grow from your work and not shy away from it. What I consider to be “bad writing” is actually

just “old writing,” and there is nothing wrong with that. The second interview that caught my

attention was with Stephen King. The part of this interview that I found interesting was when he

was talking about his revision process. He explained that he lets his works “marinate” in his
head for some time before revisiting it. I relate to this because sometimes I need to set a piece

of writing down for a while before looking back at it or no progress will be made. This doesn’t

mean that the work isn’t improving because the break is necessary. A bad habit that I have

when it comes to writing is to resort to one of two methods. Either I wait until the deadline to

begin and the work turns out incredibly rushed, or I complete the writing long ahead of time and

never look at it again. I think I can learn from Stephen King and start letting my writing sit for a

while, then make sure to revisit it after the break. After the video was over, my group discussed

our thoughts. By talking with them, we helped answer any questions we had. For example, we

discussed if we thought our processes would align with these writers, if this meant our

processes were “wrong,” and elaborated on details we missed. Now that the activity is done, I

can reflect back on my experience and know that I should take action on each of the things I

learned. I knew what I had taken from the experience, but putting it into words helped me see

this: I need to give myself more grace while writing, and I need to give myself more time when I

think I’m done. These two things go hand in hand, and I’m sure that when I start to implement

them, I will see improvement.