REFLECTION
Admittedly, I was pretty intimidated when this project was introduced. As much as I love the idea of being a creative writer, and doing creative projects like these, in practice I’m usually a bit of a mess. I procrastinate, I overthink, I end up feeling tortured, and worst of all, hating the work I end up with. However, this project pleasantly surprised me! I got all my work done in a timely manner, and I’m incredibly happy with how my story ended up. Not only that, but I genuinely enjoyed myself while I was writing it, something that I can’t say is true of every project I’ve done (even the creative ones).
And I think that in part is due to how personal this project was for me. The central themes of the story; the fear of growing up and the dangers of being selfish in life, cowardice and loneliness, they’re all themes that directly relate to me in some way. So the writing of this was, in some way, an uncanny experience for me. It was as if I was writing myself into the story, not only through Ruth, but through the monsters as well. It was honestly incredibly cathartic. I got to write my worst fears and anxieties about the world and about myself in a creative way, and that’s an amazing thing (and something that wasn’t even planned!).
This experience taught me to appreciate all the time and work that actually goes into stories—horror stories in particular—even the ones that seem relatively easy or short. It really does take a lot of careful planning, not only in the details of the story itself, but in how to pace and execute those details. It also taught me that despite how much I might not like it, or how tedious it might feel, doing detailed research on the themes and other aspects of a project is extremely important to its outcome—both in its quality, and how much you enjoyed creating it.
As far as strongest and weakest points of my work go, I am my own harshest critic. I’m often only able to identify what I think I could’ve done better, and fail to recognize the things that are strong. That being said, I think that the writing—particularly the dialogue portions—of my adaptation, as well as the work I did for my research summary are both really strong, and I’m extremely proud of them both. As for the weakest points, I think the pacing towards the end of the story is a bit too fast, and I think I could’ve done more pieces of concept art and/or improved further on the ones I already had. But other than those few things, I did exceptionally well on this project and all its pieces, and I put a lot of time into everything, so I think for that, I deserve a grade between a B and an A.