A Moment In Time
Vignette
The Man Once My Brother.
I knew as I watched the rugged mountains of Colorado change first to plains, then desert, then finally the rolling coastal hills of California, that this was going to be the last time I saw my brother as the boy I grew up with. The next time I would see the man that shared his name and face, he would be just that, a man. I shuddered in my seat as we pulled into the open air, adobe colored and stucco textured hotel. We exited the old beat up truck and I stood for a moment, frozen by the tension in the air. I stared at the sun, just beginning to touch the crests of the grey waves on the horizon, and bathing the spanish architecture of the buildings around us with golden light. We didn’t bother to take in our own bags; they were buried under a mountain of the belongings that constituted everything my brother owned. Instead, we simply staggered into our hotel room, and waited for my brother to arrive. He had been out in Palo Alto for the past week without us, camping with the people who would soon be his fellow college freshmen. I don’t remember much of the room, only that it was a small room, with rust colored walls, and an old splintery door which appeared to be hewn from the same hazardous mahogany wood as the balcony to the door’s right. My mind whirled with all the changes my brother’s exodus would create. I started breathing sporadically, consumed by the bittersweet reverence brought from memories of my brother and I running through sharp barbed fences and verdant grass fields amidst the resplendent sunlight of an early summer morning, and of those thin crimson slashes that criss-crossed our unprotected legs and arms each time we returned from our journeys. I would never again feel the same reverence I had in childhood. In that moment, I would have given anything to feel the bliss of my scratched arms and legs one more time. My breaths came harsher with each second, until they were silenced by the first knock on the gnarled hotel door.
I viewed my brother walk into the room, framed by the sun’s final ochreous lights. With eyes beginning to moisten with tears, I saw my parents and brother talking. Their mouths were moving and heads nodding, but all I heard was a high pitched droning buzz, as if a mosquito was trapped within my skull. The noise continued as my parents and brother hugged, their eyes first brimming then overflowing with tears. He left my parents with damp silvery tracks etched through the dirt travel had left on their faces, and then turned his eyes towards me. The moment our eyes caught, the buzzing noise ceased. We quickly crossed the few feet of distance between us and embraced. I still thought of us as kids, him my superior and I his happy subordinate, but while I was standing there I saw my parents, not my brother’s right shoulder as I expected. As the realization of lost childhood flooded me, my eyes did the same. The burning orange and crimson light of a dying day became distorted by the water in my eyes. We may have stood there for a minute, maybe an eternity, but when we disentangled, I remember looking into my brother’s eyes, which were as wet as mine. I could plead, beg, scream, make him stay. But instead, I said nothing. Then, in a tone only someone who had spent their entire life with another person, shared the same fears, pains, and joys could, he said three words. “I’ll be fine.” And then he turned to gather his belongings from our old truck, leaving us in the cold dark blue of twilight. I tried as hard as I possibly could to hang onto my brother, and the childhood he was tied to. But from then on, I only saw the man that took his name.
I knew as I watched the rugged mountains of Colorado change first to plains, then desert, then finally the rolling coastal hills of California, that this was going to be the last time I saw my brother as the boy I grew up with. The next time I would see the man that shared his name and face, he would be just that, a man. I shuddered in my seat as we pulled into the open air, adobe colored and stucco textured hotel. We exited the old beat up truck and I stood for a moment, frozen by the tension in the air. I stared at the sun, just beginning to touch the crests of the grey waves on the horizon, and bathing the spanish architecture of the buildings around us with golden light. We didn’t bother to take in our own bags; they were buried under a mountain of the belongings that constituted everything my brother owned. Instead, we simply staggered into our hotel room, and waited for my brother to arrive. He had been out in Palo Alto for the past week without us, camping with the people who would soon be his fellow college freshmen. I don’t remember much of the room, only that it was a small room, with rust colored walls, and an old splintery door which appeared to be hewn from the same hazardous mahogany wood as the balcony to the door’s right. My mind whirled with all the changes my brother’s exodus would create. I started breathing sporadically, consumed by the bittersweet reverence brought from memories of my brother and I running through sharp barbed fences and verdant grass fields amidst the resplendent sunlight of an early summer morning, and of those thin crimson slashes that criss-crossed our unprotected legs and arms each time we returned from our journeys. I would never again feel the same reverence I had in childhood. In that moment, I would have given anything to feel the bliss of my scratched arms and legs one more time. My breaths came harsher with each second, until they were silenced by the first knock on the gnarled hotel door.
I viewed my brother walk into the room, framed by the sun’s final ochreous lights. With eyes beginning to moisten with tears, I saw my parents and brother talking. Their mouths were moving and heads nodding, but all I heard was a high pitched droning buzz, as if a mosquito was trapped within my skull. The noise continued as my parents and brother hugged, their eyes first brimming then overflowing with tears. He left my parents with damp silvery tracks etched through the dirt travel had left on their faces, and then turned his eyes towards me. The moment our eyes caught, the buzzing noise ceased. We quickly crossed the few feet of distance between us and embraced. I still thought of us as kids, him my superior and I his happy subordinate, but while I was standing there I saw my parents, not my brother’s right shoulder as I expected. As the realization of lost childhood flooded me, my eyes did the same. The burning orange and crimson light of a dying day became distorted by the water in my eyes. We may have stood there for a minute, maybe an eternity, but when we disentangled, I remember looking into my brother’s eyes, which were as wet as mine. I could plead, beg, scream, make him stay. But instead, I said nothing. Then, in a tone only someone who had spent their entire life with another person, shared the same fears, pains, and joys could, he said three words. “I’ll be fine.” And then he turned to gather his belongings from our old truck, leaving us in the cold dark blue of twilight. I tried as hard as I possibly could to hang onto my brother, and the childhood he was tied to. But from then on, I only saw the man that took his name.
https://drive.google.com/a/animashighschool.com/file/d/0BwOHpURSjD6ZZ1JfMzZIOXlkUDQ/view?usp=sharing
Reflection
Project Reflection
This project tasked us to select an event in our lives that we viewed as influential, or that was important to us in some way. We then wrote one page vignettes about our event. This piece of writing was designed around the focuses of specificity, style, and episodic elaboration(structure). The purpose of this project was to work on our abilities of refinement and imagery. We were also encouraged to make another form of media to convey our story, once it was created.
Through this project, I feel that my writing abilities have exponentially increased. This project has not only majorly increased my figurative language abilities, but it has also taught me about characterization. My figurative language has improved through many revision processes in this project. I went through three drafts of my project, and each time I payed attention to my story’s ability to create a sense of immersion in its reader. This allowed for a deep meta analysis of my thinking in the story, and improvement to the point that it prompted tears in my fellow students. The project has also allowed me to learn about characterization: the process of making a believable and effective character. While I had a general understanding of this process before, I was able to take it to the next level with this project. I learned about character’s desires, and was surprised to hear that in most good writing characters have two desires, inner and exterior desires. These exterior desires usually elude to the character’s inner desires. I applied this in my story, and it is because of this that I feel my characters to be the strongest and most real I have ever made. On top of this progression as a writer, I also learned about the building blocks of all good stories, called story grammar, why we tell stories, how writing can transform situations, and how narrative writing can improve our general writing ability. Story grammar constitutes the textual and implied actions within a story that allow for progression of the story and high quality story telling.The parts of story grammar include setting, characters, initiating actions, attempts, results, responses, and dialogue. I learned ,through this project ,why we tell stories. According to Sarah-Jane Murray, stories are an extremely effective method of conveying information, as people are 22 times more likely to remember facts heard in story form than not. Writing can transform an experience by putting it into an analytical light. Memories usually have two parts, events and emotions connected with these events. Writing about these events allows for you to take an outside perspective, and analyze it logically, instead of emotionally. Writing about these experiences can also have a great improvement on your writing abilities. Narrative writing forces the writer to work a lot harder to create an immersive feeling within their writing, since they are unable to write within the first person. Instead of being able to have the reader experience an emotion or event by simply using first person perspective and slightly colorful language, the author must make their story come to life on the page to create the same effect, which when applied to other writing, creates a phenomenal level of immersion.
The idea of a condensed piece of writing is what stood out to me, and challenged me the most. The format of our project forced us to write the most stylistic and specific piece of writing we had ever created, all on a maximum of one page. This was very difficult for two reasons, one was the fact that we needed to make this our best and most specific piece of writing ever, and the second was the absolute foreignness of a one page maximum. In every past essay I have written, I have been told one of two things: make it as long as it needs to be to convey your point, or something along the lines of “at least a page long, minimum”. Because of this, having only one page available seemed ludicrous. The page limit was intimidating enough, but we were also asked to make this the best piece of writing we had ever produced. All of my past “good” pieces of writing were at least two pages in length, so I was challenged by this idea. While this project was fairly difficult, it forced me to explore my writing and refinement abilities, and thus made me a much better writer. With this said, I would not change anything about the project.
The most important personal lesson I learned through this process was that writing has an inherent power within it. I learned this lesson when I shared my vignette with the class. After I looked up from my page I saw people around me tearing up, along with myself. Before this I always thought of storytelling as a rather numb art. It could never conjure up an image as well as a painting could, or express an emotion as well as a song could, or even tell a story as well as a movie. I was wrong. Through this project I found the realization that the written word really does hold more power than any other form of art, since it is thought in its purest form.
This project tasked us to select an event in our lives that we viewed as influential, or that was important to us in some way. We then wrote one page vignettes about our event. This piece of writing was designed around the focuses of specificity, style, and episodic elaboration(structure). The purpose of this project was to work on our abilities of refinement and imagery. We were also encouraged to make another form of media to convey our story, once it was created.
Through this project, I feel that my writing abilities have exponentially increased. This project has not only majorly increased my figurative language abilities, but it has also taught me about characterization. My figurative language has improved through many revision processes in this project. I went through three drafts of my project, and each time I payed attention to my story’s ability to create a sense of immersion in its reader. This allowed for a deep meta analysis of my thinking in the story, and improvement to the point that it prompted tears in my fellow students. The project has also allowed me to learn about characterization: the process of making a believable and effective character. While I had a general understanding of this process before, I was able to take it to the next level with this project. I learned about character’s desires, and was surprised to hear that in most good writing characters have two desires, inner and exterior desires. These exterior desires usually elude to the character’s inner desires. I applied this in my story, and it is because of this that I feel my characters to be the strongest and most real I have ever made. On top of this progression as a writer, I also learned about the building blocks of all good stories, called story grammar, why we tell stories, how writing can transform situations, and how narrative writing can improve our general writing ability. Story grammar constitutes the textual and implied actions within a story that allow for progression of the story and high quality story telling.The parts of story grammar include setting, characters, initiating actions, attempts, results, responses, and dialogue. I learned ,through this project ,why we tell stories. According to Sarah-Jane Murray, stories are an extremely effective method of conveying information, as people are 22 times more likely to remember facts heard in story form than not. Writing can transform an experience by putting it into an analytical light. Memories usually have two parts, events and emotions connected with these events. Writing about these events allows for you to take an outside perspective, and analyze it logically, instead of emotionally. Writing about these experiences can also have a great improvement on your writing abilities. Narrative writing forces the writer to work a lot harder to create an immersive feeling within their writing, since they are unable to write within the first person. Instead of being able to have the reader experience an emotion or event by simply using first person perspective and slightly colorful language, the author must make their story come to life on the page to create the same effect, which when applied to other writing, creates a phenomenal level of immersion.
The idea of a condensed piece of writing is what stood out to me, and challenged me the most. The format of our project forced us to write the most stylistic and specific piece of writing we had ever created, all on a maximum of one page. This was very difficult for two reasons, one was the fact that we needed to make this our best and most specific piece of writing ever, and the second was the absolute foreignness of a one page maximum. In every past essay I have written, I have been told one of two things: make it as long as it needs to be to convey your point, or something along the lines of “at least a page long, minimum”. Because of this, having only one page available seemed ludicrous. The page limit was intimidating enough, but we were also asked to make this the best piece of writing we had ever produced. All of my past “good” pieces of writing were at least two pages in length, so I was challenged by this idea. While this project was fairly difficult, it forced me to explore my writing and refinement abilities, and thus made me a much better writer. With this said, I would not change anything about the project.
The most important personal lesson I learned through this process was that writing has an inherent power within it. I learned this lesson when I shared my vignette with the class. After I looked up from my page I saw people around me tearing up, along with myself. Before this I always thought of storytelling as a rather numb art. It could never conjure up an image as well as a painting could, or express an emotion as well as a song could, or even tell a story as well as a movie. I was wrong. Through this project I found the realization that the written word really does hold more power than any other form of art, since it is thought in its purest form.