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hellogirlslikegirlslikeboysdo · 4 months

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And the lights are not fluorescent, and there are no words on the page. - Zuihitsu/Hybrid Essay

Author's Preface and Ch. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7

Description: My final portfolio for one of the creative writing courses I took based around exploring the creative nonfiction essay in its many literary forms, with any and all identifying names or signifiers censored out.

This essay may not actually, in the most technical sense available, “pass” as a submission to the “Essay 3: Zuihitsu/ Hybrid” assignment.

If you are interested in financial compensation for your loss, feel free to contact us at 1-800-THIS-AUTHOR-IS-PHYSICALLY-ALLERGIC-TO-UNDERSTANDING-BASIC-DIRECTIONS. We are taking the time and liberty to inform you of this upcoming inconvenience not only as a hook for the first line of this essay, nor to plead “ignorance of the literary law” during its grading process, but rather to provide a reference point based in where said essay is coming from, and where it plans on going for the remainder of its duration.

As we’re sure you’ve found in your time as an academic instructor working at [REDACTED], [REDACTED]’s famous claim of a “gradeless” curriculum in the traditional sense (ie. a lack of letters or percentiles) may hold up in the previously mentioned technical sense (excluding the GPA our final evaluations get translated into during the grad school application process), however, most of the expectations and requirements professors hold in their classrooms act as a sort of “pass/fail” grading system anyway, though the unique teaching philosophy shared amongst them and facility tends to inspire only two genuine points of grading criteria: “Is the assignment complete in provable effort and its entirety?” and “Does it follow the awarded instructions?”

After countless scouring on the internet, our class notes, the description and examples left in the Canvas page, and our memory of class the day you explained it, we have come to the dreaded conclusion that this essay may not fit the second criterion.

Our continued rough drafting is committed, rather, to the hope that our confusion on the nature of the hybrid essay, the actual difference between Zuihitsu poetry vs Zuihitsu essay writing, the necessity of following a particular theme or idea throughout, the assigned process behind this essay, each supposed segment’s expected length or whether this portion’s subject matter qualifies it as an actual part of the essay, or even the correct way to separate each section, will somehow act in the spirit of Zuihitsu literature: Following the pen wherever it leads you.

Wish us luck, dear reader.

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I found the same kind of fun in the animal diary that I find in all our in-class hands-on work: Obvious, self-explanatory, and buried deep within the depths of the most artistic/freeform aspect of the activity. Like clockwork, it requires me to brush away the specks of uncertainty in the directions, my withered hands revealing the big, bright label plastered on top.

It reads exactly how you imagine it reads: “See!! See, look, I told you I was here! You were so focused on making sure this assignment helped you towards your next essay, you thought you wouldn’t have room for me, but here I am, idiot! You’re having a good goddamn time drawing a funky little platypus, and it’s all thanks to me! Leave your thank you on the way out, ya dumb bitch!”

Apart from the question of why this metaphor requires a labeling gun with such long stickers, one has to wonder what disgusting alleyway all that distracting stress crawled out of. The supposed safety net of my professors, generally speaking, knowing what exactly they’re doing (those PHDs don’t exactly just pop into existence one day) does quite little to sway this approach to learning in all its hypervigilance. I’ve posited many theories over the years, tangentially and never allowing myself the time for a full conclusion; It could be the looming threat of how little time I have to devote to brainstorming how to attack my assignments, maybe the unshakable internal insistence (blame capitalism or the public schooling for that, either’s a fine scapegoat and the “why” is too abstract to help me in the middle of class) that learning has to be productive towards a traceable later goal, instead of myself as a whole and an academic (if I have nothing tangible to show for my efforts, how can I be sure I even followed the directions correctly?).

The most troubling option, embarrassing as it is for someone who claims to prioritize her career as a writer above all else, is that I’m simply trying to justify using the skills and techniques as they are given to me, in hopes that the results they wield in class are shiny enough for me to actually use them outside of the class.

I do wonder if I took the animal diary this seriously when I first encountered it. My memory flickers under the winds of time, but I’m leaning towards no.

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It does, of course, come to my attention what asking for clarification on the instructions could do, but the things classification has done in the past (make just as little sense as before, confuse me further, led my mind even farther from the intended understanding, you know the drill) brushes the thought away.

Years of fractured, sprawled-out education has taught me my best approach for tasks I’m not fully sure about is to set my concerns aside and simply go with what I think is best, consequences be damned!

(And by damned, I mean, as I’m sure you guessed, professionally dealt with at a later date.)

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Maybe the apologetic, justifying tone gives me away, maybe it's the heavy overarching theme in this freeform-style essay, but I should confess that my current thoughts are mixed in the way they always are. Half are swirling around the task at hand and what little attention I can pay to it (as always). The other half is on what I really wish I was writing (ie. what I am always thinking about, somewhere, way in the back): Whatever nonsense my brain has deemed flashy enough to name my current hyperfixation (The Stanley Parable at the moment I’m writing this, though I’m sure it’ll have changed by the time I come back to edit this).

That latter half, of course, brings me to the conundrum I’ve left out to dry ever since I labeled myself a writer. I want to spend this entire essay rambling on about this stupid little video game, and its two stupid little main characters, and the actually brilliant way they need each other more than the narrative itself needs them in one blog-style expository essay, well underneath 750 words. But that just won’t work, in the same way that what I wish I was writing even more than that (fiction, prose in particular) won’t work either. In the simplest of terms, that’s not what this assignment is about. And in order to actually learn, to grow as a writer, I can’t just write what I want to. I have to write what I need to.

#creative nonfiction #essay #the stanley parable #scattered thoughts #experimental #creative writing #nonfiction #themes #creative process #realization #creating art #emotional #musings #writing

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i-spilled-the-starjuice · 11 months

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I hope this is a very relatable mood for at least 3 people

#original art #my art #silly little guy #shitposts #sticker art #my little blorbo #creating art #tee hee

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honeycombvinyl · 5 months

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2023/12/11

Officially decided today that I'm going to try to get back into painting over the holidays! It's been four years since I last created any art and it's definitely been hurting me. I'm so inspired, have a ton of ideas, and I'm so excited to start again <3

#personal post #girl blogger #blog post #art #creating art #painting

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sullina · 5 months

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I think i just realized something about artists and the art that they create. Not sure if it's gonne be coherent, but I'm gonna do my best. It might come off as a little pretentious towards the end.

because really good art (can be anything, but always seems to have a special something about it) often seems to be created by people who are at least a little weird

and I think it's precisely because they're weird that they can create good art

because if you're weird, you're pretty much forced to analyse the world we live in in order to realize that you're different, because if you don't do that, you pretty much become super depressed, you're gonna think that everyone just hates you for no reason other than because you're you.

which doesn't change all that much once you realize that you're not normal, but realizing that you are different, that you're not normal, brings a certain confidence with it, I think. the "blame" of why you can't get along with others shifts from "you're doing something wrong that makes everyone hate you" to "they're the ones antagonizing you solely because you're not like them, you did nothing wrong" (I'm exaggerating, but you get the point)

And once you realize that, I think most people who are weird more or less start analysing what exactly makes them different from the normal people and gain a deeper understanding for how the world and how people work, in a way.

And a lot of art involves intentionally depicting the real world, be that in pictures, in stories, etc. and i feel like people who are weird can just do that better, because they have to analyse how the world works and the different reciprocal effects of it, but also how the world is.

It feels more real, because it's a less superficial depiction.

If i were to reword this post, maybe something like this would work better:

A less experienced author who has chosen a setting will throw in elements of that setting, because that's what that setting has in real life (or in other stories with the same setting)

A more experienced author with the same setting will chose the elements they use more carefully, picking what will work for the story and what isn't needed, how they can use each element and make it work for the plot and the characters they have in mind.

Think of it like the famous example of the blue curtains. In a book, where you have no visual representation of a room, only what the author gives you, you get the color of curtains. If the author has some experience, they're likely telling you more than just the color of the curtains. Why were they blue? Why not any other color? Why tell you about the curtains at all, if it's not important in some way or another? It doesn't have to be a big revelation, but it should tell you something about the plot or the character.

Maybe the curtains were red before, and they were changed between then and now. Maybe blue is someones favourite color, so when something else they have is not blue, in this story where any object can be made blue, it is something to look out for. Maybe it's a red herring.

In other words, the blue curtains in a book aren't a throwaway line, they're a detail that the author is intentionally telling you about.

The author who wrote that line thought "they're in a room with a window, so there's probably curtains there" and went "the curtains and their color is a detail important enough to tell the reader even though in real life, curtains are rather insignificant" and that's what I meant when i said that weird people are better at creating good art that normal people, because normal people likely never had to examine the status quo, but weird people do.

#art #creating art #idk I'm just rambling #i feel like I'm onto something here though

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enchantzz · 1 year

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I was contemplating if I should post this, but I think I should. It doesn't only concern myself, but also other creators, so I want to say something about using creations, posting them elsewhere etc.

I don't mind my gifs, creations, edits etc. being reblogged and/or used in for example mood boards, but please show a little appreciation and credit. Even if you are using my "art" outside of Tumblr. Please know that I'm not a fan of my stuff leaving Tumblr, except when I choose to use it myself outside of this blog.

Here on Tumblr, it is very easy to find out who posted something first or created something if it's not too dated. I do understand, however, that it's not always clear who created something, especially when it's a little older and it's all over the internet. but for new stuff, it's very easy to find the original post, like my Richard Armitage / FQ gif sets, which can be found here and here.

I don't like to watermark what I create, but if this "stealing" for the lack of a better word for it, keeps happening, then I might need to start doing that and I will send Aidan/Mitchell and Richard/Rick (OC) after you

That said, I also do realize that I might have posted things for which I didn't know who created it, but 1. I have a general text for that in my blog, so that you can always alert me if something is yours and 2. I usually mention that in the post.

Thank you to all the creators out there who create amazing art, gifs, edits and so on. Please be a little considerate and REBLOG (not re-post as your own) and CREDIT.

Thank you.

#creating art #reblogging #original art #my gifs #credit #content creators #aidan turner #richard armitage #john mitchell #rick marlowe #art and vampires #watermark

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rowdycloudyart · 1 year

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Howdy! It's cloudy welcome welcome ☁️✨

Rowdy: out-going, unhinged, spontaneous, intense Cloudy: serene, melancholy, calm, introverted

Rowdy and Cloudy are two characters created on the balance between the intense rowdy gal and the serene cloudy girl ☁️

Hi, I'm Adri the artist & aspiring Art Therapist here documenting my progress! This is my art blog where I post fan art, and personal projects, and talk about my overall struggles as an artist & psychology student. I'm currently 25, my pronouns are she/her, and I struggle with depression/anxiety. I decided to "label" depression w/ cloudy & anxiety w/ rowdy bc I've noticed these are the 2 character tropes I tend to draw & relate to. Drawing has always been therapeutic for me, and I think it can help others even if you "suck at drawing". Creating art & documenting my thought process is my main goal for @rowdycloudygal and I hope to connect with you soon! :D read below for more personal likes/dislikes

Instagram my tweets Patreon Youtube ko-fi TikTok

Anime/entertainment:

JOJO I'm fully indulging in my Jotaro obsession

Avatar the last airbender zutara 4ever

Pokemon & animal crossing (only games I'll play)

Korrasami

omg i used to be "teamvegeta16" online HAHA food i like:

miso soup or any SOUP YES

coffee w/ oatmilk

mmm chicken salad

seafood! ceviche, sushi, crab YUMM

kiwi ...um.. is it weird that i eat the skin??!?!

Dislikes:

Drawing HAHAH sometimes it's hard to get into it

impatient entitled Karen-type customers/drivers UGHH

when my cat leaves the room when i wanna cuddle :(

that one hair that grows out my mole AHH

cold soup :'-(

random Unpopular opinion: celebrity obsessions are weird to me-- yet I can be completely obsessed with an animated fictional character LMAO Any other questions, or drawing requests, or if you'd like to open up & tell me about YOU feel free to send a DM so we can connect :D

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missshezz · 2 years

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Me while rubbing my hands together: “Alright, let’s create some art!”

Also me after opening the sketchbook:

#mood #the witcher #witcher memes #geralt of rivera #whole ass mood #art #creating art #artist on tumblr #meet the artist

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euesworld · 2 years

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"I'm falling amongst the planets and stars, with every heartbeat my life creates art.. and every time that I paint a brush stroke across your soul, a smile drifts just across it like a falling star."

You are poetry, so much more, nothing less - eUë

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whatdoyoushay · 2 years

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If ya know, ya know

🫧👁🖌🍊🍄🍃

#whatdoyoushay #art #creating art #I’m not professional #I’m just procreational #okay #why am I listening to canned heat like I’ve never heard them before

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hellogirlslikegirlslikeboysdo · 4 months

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And the lights are not fluorescent, and there are no words on the page. - Voice/Rough Draft Essay

Author's Preface and Ch. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7

During my many travels, I have found sticking a man and his daughter in a hot car for approximately 116 miles, radio on low, murmuring music she likes and he doesn’t, homemade food in Tupperware in insulated beach bags in piles of slowly unfolding clothes in the back of the trunk, will, against or with their collective will, bring about conclusions. Asinine, podcast-y, “This action will have consequences“ conclusions. Some the father’s already decided and convinced the daughter of (and vice versa).

You’ll get them in a wide variety of (recurring) topics too! The entertainment industry, capitalism, education, and, if you, the reader, happened to be a stowaway on my last return to college, my mother’s own gradual and uncharitable concussion:

That she, at the ripe old age of 50-something, is done growing as a person.

It checked out when consulted her track record, like it was fact-checking for an intervention: Her slow-roasted resentment in my grandmother’s miserly recognition of her overwhelming lifelong achievements (and, subsequently, her brother for slurping up all the motherly attention grandma served up, like the part eched little thing he was), barely abated by her (1) confrontation of my grandmother’s behavior. The following mourning period, shared with me and my father for two months at best. Her go-to apology: “I guess I’m a bad person then!” said in the most patronizing voice she could muster (and believe me when I say she has plenty of experience).

My mother is a firecracker more than she is a woman, raw, rich personality stuffed inside what looks like Barbie-laminated plastic, engineered at initial creation to shoot off into the sky quicker than the strike of a match. To burn out, quietly, like the star that she is, following the promise of a thunderous boom. A great disappointment you only understand in adulthood.

Of course she saw life, her life, as just sorta…like that. Nothing to be done about it, you could figure she figured. Best to hang that soggy pit of sadness on the coat rack and hope to god it dries in time for work tomorrow.

I wasn’t grown up though, despite my age of 20 whole years. At least, not enough to understand how anyone else could think like that. Could find something tucked away in the recess of their life that just wasn’t quite right, and go “...Mmmm that should be good enough.” The best explanation, the one meant for someone so young and hopeful in their delusions, was found in the very first conclusion I managed to bulldoze my father into coming to that evening: Ever since man first inhaled the emancipating power of creativity and survived the exhale, there has been art born out of someone, somewhere, going “...Well, it looks like the picture in the book”, and calling it a night.

You may be surprised to hear this, considering this little article of mine is (arguably) fairly coherent and, at the very least, not actively killing your brain cells, but my favorite television show of all time is one of the laziest, thoughtless, and most exhaustive pieces of media 14-year-old me had ever seen in her measly little life. It was a 15-minute serialized animated cartoon named Breadwinners running on Nickelodeon's spinoff channel, Nicktoons, at the time, aired only two seasons, and if you value your time and self-respect, you will not watch it. All you need to know about the show is the words of its co-“creator” (the term, of course, used in the most ambiguous sense possible, within the confines of human minds) Gary Di Raffaele on his and Steve Boris shared writing process: “I think, when you watch a Breadwinners episode, it feels and it sounds like no other cartoon because it’s, it’s got that, that constant drive, that constant beat.“ (“Meet The Creators”), an unofficial elaboration on the previous statement, “The way we produce our show is pretty much unlike anything else that’s been produced.” (“Meet The Creators”).

What follows these sentiments are only a few more words on the animation process and the collaborative angle the show’s crew takes, but Gary’s tone (and the show itself) is so clear and obvious that the second part of that sentence, I feel, can barely be classified as an inference. “Unlike anything else that’s been produced”, because that’s what makes the show so unique, so fun and wacky and zany!

So good.

The filming of this interview (with the help of fevered, extensive consumption of both every decent video essay critiquing this show and every episode of the show I’ve gotten my hands on) has only confirmed my suspicions. Sometime after the greenlighting of their pilot and the subsequent order of a first season, Raffaele and Boris had come to the reasonable observation that one of the many redeeming qualities used to defend a show’s quality is its supposed uniqueness, its fresh ideas or concepts. Even its ability to introduce familiar archetypes and plotlines and tropes in a new and exciting way, or with a twist or subversion of sorts! They then, despite now having contact with at least a few of Nickelodeon's experienced and accomplished writers now within contact, stumbled down one of the many historic writing pitfalls of overeager amateurs and seasoned veterans who have lost their touch over time: The assumption that because their writing looks like some of the quality art they’ve seen before, it simply must be of just as high a quality.

This artistically stunting philosophy grows in many familiar places, the way mold grows on trash bins left on the curb on a hot summer Tuesday. You may find it in the 12-year-old who is just beginning to explore their artistic capabilities by tracing screenshots of anime characters they found online, or the burned-out cartoon writer, a fast-approaching deadline for the shipment of an episode’s storyboard hanging over their head, and a hastily downed Starbucks coffee hanging off the side of their desk. You may even find it trapped within the inner workings of your own creative work (though I do hope you never do). Either way, you will find the same outcome in every new example you find yourself confronted with:

The writer eventually mistakes their work’s resemblance to the type of art they aim to recreate, whether that be in the way said example tugs at the heartstrings or gets its viewer’s blood pumping, for proof that their work accomplishes these feats too, simply due to its traceable proximity to its inspiration.

The stand-up comic throws in jokes that don’t land because they have identifiable setups and punchlines, the romance novelist adds a sex scene even when it grinds the plot to an unnecessary halt because her favorite book has one too, and the writers behind Breadwinners use an inventive new production strategy to make the zaniest, off-the-wall scripts their network had ever seen, in hopes they would help the show stand out amongst all the other wacky competition in each week’s programming block and ensure each episode shocks and surprises 9-12 year olds everywhere. That Breadwinners would be innovative, eye-catching, and above all else, unique.

This inherent “uniqueness”, of course, was presumed to come neatly prepackaged with the intended goal of their solely comedy-focused cartoon: Making the viewer laugh. In any way possible. If you’ve ever seen an episode of Breadwinners, you know fully well that it did not.

“But [REDACTED],” You cry. “Haven’t you ever written something in the style of the things you like? Who are you to judge?” Normally, I would recount the “Appeal to Hypocrisy” fallacy in detail, but this article is already long enough (I would also question why you are talking to an online article as if it can hear you, but I digress). I will instead surrender my own early work, “Body Swichers” (I invite you to ignore the spelling, if you can), as tribute, and instead call your attention to this excerpt from a twelve-year-old me with a cliche plot line and far-too-early access to Microsoft Word: “Instead of the cheerful, spike-haired boy, he saw his sarcastic, witty friend, Gretchen in the mirror…Megee raced toured the closet and pulled out an antique, dusty, enormous book.” (Sacristan 1)

Notably bad grammar and sentence structure aside, this quote is a direct result of my ongoing journey as a writer. The first thing I had ever written, the first chapter of a romance/adventure story, was an attempt to recreate the magic I’d found in the many, many novels I had gotten lost in as a child. It was, predictably, not successful. Every line held the bland and awkward hallmarks of a child’s first draft, despite both my parents’ insistence on how it didn’t. Instead of falling back on the idea that it was good by virtue of it sharing an intended style with works I had deemed good, however, I opened up my laptop a few weeks later, pulled up Internet Explorer, and set out to find why that chapter didn’t intrigue me as much as the writing in my favorite series.

This process soon led to the discovery that the books I liked had big, descriptive words in them, words like “sarcastic” and “antique” and “enormous”. The incorporation of these words in my next work led to the question of why everything I wrote sounded so clunky and redundant all of a sudden, which led to learning about effective word choice, and then good sentence structure, and then impactful tone and atmosphere, and countless other improvements! Most importantly, however, is how it highlights the difference between my approach and Boris and Raffaele, despite still sitting at an amateurish level myself.

They took inspiration thinking it would ensure quality work, to somehow magically copy and paste its greatness into their own writing. I took inspiration to learn what made it so great in the first place.

So, there. That, I figure, is how someone could look at something in their life, whether it be art, a personal flaw, or even their entire self, and assume it resembles what it's supposed to look like well enough to “pass”, whatever in god’s name that’s supposed to mean. (One way, at least.) And I’m sure this theory could apply to other aspects of issues I’ve touched upon in this article. The dire need to push yourself as a writer and avoiding the comfort of creative complacency in your work, the way this type of thinking directly informs the prevailing disrespect children’s television writers holding in their audience, mistranslating “silly and childish” as “good enough for kids”, even how that reflects a wider disrespect for children in society as a whole!

I hope, however, the single grain of wisdom you and I both take away from this literary exploration is the same one I found detailed in Stephen King’s autobiography, On Writing, in his mother’s disappointment upon realizing that that the little hand-drawn comics he’d been showing her were direct tracings of someone else’s work. IN the novel, she dismisses the original works, citing them as “junk” and insisting that she “...’bet you [he] could do better. Write one of your own.’” (King 28)

Can you imagine, truly, if King (a young child who’d never written an actual story in his whole life and could have very easily done so!) had disregarded his mother’s advice under the guise that nothing could be better than something identical to one of his favorite things to read, that drawing something that looks like them was good enough on its own? If we were forced to live in a world where this advice didn’t lead him to publish so many of the literary classics we know and love today, like “It”, or “Carrie”, or “The Outsider”?…I can’t, since I haven’t actually read any of his books, but this world has been gracious enough to let me bear witness to Carrie (1976), the Carrie musical’s off-broadway cast album, and some of the loveliest It fanart I’ve ever seen, So I imagine that world, in the kindest of words, totally blows. It stands to reason, then, that we, as writers, have a creative duty to keep growing and improving both ourselves and our work, to make sure we never come to see it.

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