by Naomi L. | August 7, 2015 | Flash Fiction, J.C. Wolfe's Writing |
(What If? Exercise: Read the description here.)
Having gotten through college without a problem, I honestly thought getting a Master’s degree would be simple, but I didn’t realize it would be a whole different experience right from the beginning, from talking to your professors for hours to come up with a great idea for a project, to having to write a standout résumé and totally kill it in the interview, and then sitting through the requisite amount of discipline hours for a whole semester before actually getting started on the project, only to realize halfway through the program that your methods were never feasible for a two-year project to begin with, so you spend another several hours discussing it with your advisors until the project has changed completely, meaning you have to start almost from scratch with only one year left to get everything done on time, so you rush through your lab work in what turns out to be a lesson on why you should never rush through lab work that sets you back another month, but you stay optimistic in the knowledge that it’s all a learning experience and now you know what not to do, so you press on through one obstacle after the other – difficult field work, delayed lab material deliveries, failed DNA amplifications – until you finally have enough results to begin last-minute data analyses, all the while reading up-to-the-minute papers that risk changing the entire course of the thesis you’ve been writing and rewriting for the past few months, and just as you’re about to give up the last shred of hope that you’ll be able to meet the final deadline, you reach deep down inside and find that final burst of determination, and before you know it, your thesis is complete, your project has been successfully presented and defended, your paper is in preparation for submission, and all your hard work has earned you a Master’s degree, and you’re so proud of yourself that you forget all the stress you endured to make it here and focus solely on the glory of success… until you decide to pursue a Ph.D and the whole journey starts all over again.
This story is based on What If? Exercise 90: “The Journey of the Long Sentence”. The exercise is to write a short short story that’s only one sentence long. The objective is to understand how we can shape our writing in a similar manner that our minds function, building a linear order for observations that often consist of many overlapping aspects. I hope you enjoy what I’ve written. Thanks for reading!
Back to the story
by Naomi L. | August 5, 2015 | Blog, Creative Writing, What If? Writing Prompts |
It’s time for another batch of “What If?” Writing Prompts! Since I enjoyed writing the last one so much, this week’s post features another set in the history theme. See what twists you can write into true stories of the past! Good luck!
What if… every civilization in the world had shared the same religion throughout all of history?
What if… European nations hadn’t begun exploring the world in the 15th century?
What if… the British had won the American Revolutionary War?
What if… some of the greatest machines of the Industrial Age had never been invented?
What if… the Cold War had continued to the present day?
Have fun putting your own spin on historical tales!
If you have any “What If?” writing prompt suggestions (for any theme), please feel free to share them in the comments below. Ideas I like may be featured in future “What If?” posts, with full credit and a link to your blog (if you have one)! Also, if you’ve written a piece based on an idea you’ve found here, be sure to link back to the respective “What If?” post. I would love to see what you’ve done with the prompt! Thank you!
by Naomi L. | August 3, 2015 | Blog, Word of the Week |
Word: paradigm
Pronunciation: PA-rə-dym
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: a typical example or pattern of something; a model
Source: Oxford Dictionaries
So I recently attended a scientific conference, and as you can imagine, I came back with quite a few advanced words for my vocabulary list. Since I love words that can apply to both academic and artistic writing, I decided to share some of them in my Word of the Week segment. To start off, here’s a relatively common one that came up in a few of the presentations: “paradigm”. This isn’t surprising, of course; standard models are a necessary foundation for the progression of research!
A “paradigm” is a typical model, example, or pattern of something. The word comes from the Greek noun parádeigma “pattern”, which in turn comes from the verb paradeíknunai, meaning “to compare”. This verb is composed of the preposition pará “beside” and the verb deíknunai “to show”.
Although typically a technical term, “paradigm” can also be used to indicate patterns in everyday life, such as social etiquette. In linguistics, it refers to “a set of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles”, while in science it’s “a worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject”. Being an academic, I’ve read this word most often in scientific texts, but I believe it works equally well in fiction. If you want to draw attention to typical patterns or models in the action of your stories, “paradigm” is a good word to keep in mind! Good luck!
What are your thoughts on this word? Any suggestions for future “Word of the Week” featured words?
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