Revision
Writing and Remix
Manuel Sanz, MFA
Winter Quarter 2017
A central theme to Writing and Remix is there are no original ideas that aren’t derived from various combinations of preexisting ideas that, when brought together for the first time, create something new and awesome. In this class, I pulled on past experiences, research and personal interests to bring something new to the classroom to see how it could be mixed with others’ ideas to create a new and meaningful piece. This class helped me learn that anything can be worth writing about and turned into something compelling if done the right way or “remixed” with the right thing.
GRANDPA'S FARM
Farmington, Missouri
Writing Minor Capstone
Dr. Juli Parrish
Spring Quarter 2018
The goals of the Writing Minor Capstone were to assess our writing from different perspectives and criteria to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the ways we naturally write. After dissecting many pieces, I discovered that in my creative nonfiction pieces, for example, I tend to follow a more chronological narrative; knowing this, I can rework my stories to find more original beginnings and endings. Discoveries like this help me better understand how my writing is working structurally and metaphorically for me once it is external to me. Crossing the threshold of externality helps me to be more intentional about guiding my audience toward a specific meaning from my writing.
For this assignment, students were asked to select from a curated list of creative nonfiction pieces and mimic the style of the piece with a completely different story. I choose to recreate a personal story about my mother’s hometown of Farmington, Missouri in the style of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Good, Racist People”. While some of my peers chose to deconstruct the sentence structure of the pieces they were remixing, I emulated Coates' message of what it feels like to be excluded by others', regardless of whether the exclusion is intentional or not. In this remix, I recount an interaction in which I felt excluded by my grandpa to expose how subtle, thoughtless comments can harm the future of existing relationships.
LEXI
the insider
This Revision Assignment asked me to take a previously written piece and rewrite it in a way that completely changes the genre of the original. I transformed the narrative piece from my Writing and Remix class into a mix between journalism and creative nonfiction; changing the ecosystems of this piece allowed me to guide readers to an insider’s perspective of Farmington, as originally inspired by The Humans of New York. Throughout the revision process, I struggled with genre selection and balancing writing the truth creatively and authentically. In my first draft, I only used direct quotes and pieced together excerpts from the interview to create a story. After recognizing that the strict journalistic approach was limiting my creative ability to make this testimony appeal to my audience, I switched to a creative nonfiction lens. Creative nonfiction allowed me to tell the insiders' truth in a more interesting way for readers and connect them with the insiders' story. The many drafts included show this shift in my writing.