JB's+Reflection+(Writing+in+an+Unfamiliar+Genre+and+Executing+the+UFG+Project)

** 1. What did you overlook about this genre before you began writing it? **
 * __Reflections on Genre__ **

2. What mode of writing is most demanded by this genre?
===How or why? (narration, description, irony, structure verse, free verse, exposition, persuasion, analysis, etc.)===

3. What conventions other than Standard Written English distinguish the genre?
===4. Would a writer have a good reason to abuse any of these conventions of the genre? Which ones and why?===

5. Other discoveries about this genre?
I cannot write a traditional sonnet. I have spent hours upon hours reading them and thinking about them and still, I cannot come up with one on my own. I could barely write one complete quatrain in a rhyming sonnet, even with on-line resources such as a synonym-finder.com or rhymer.com. Also, because of the way I work, which is to completely backspace and start over, it is difficult to demonstrate draft details such as half-lines and the constant change in direction and word substitutions (however, I did paste into the wiki examples of my earliest attempts of two different sonnets). I thought about what it meant to grow old and also about becoming a mother—two things that I have strong feelings about—but even having an interest in a topic couldn’t help me put my thoughts into a rhymes.

Ultimately, I ran with a notion presented from “poets.org” (one of my sources): “Stretched and teased formally and thematically, today’s sonnet can often only be identified by the ghost imprint that haunts it, recognizable by the presence of 14 lines or even by name only.” I decided that my sonnet would be a modern-day version of the form, but still recognizable by a “ghost imprint” of sonnets past. In my interpretation, I kept the14 lines and followed the Petrarchan structure of octave and sestet. I also tried to explore an argument using nature to create metaphors.

I truly hated this project to the point that I wanted to give up completely. I definitely will have empathy for my future students. I didn’t feel like I had enough time, although, in all honesty, I probably could have spent another 15 hours trying to write a traditional sonnet with no solid end result. I was so frustrated by my inability to produce something, //anything//, that I question my writing ability now even more than I did before this experience. Ironically, I chose to take on this genre, which was (and still is) as far out of my comfort zone as I could imagine for myself, because I wanted a challenge, which makes the disappointment run a little deeper. I describe the process as disappointing because I couldn’t help but feel like I was circumventing the challenge and that by writing a “modern” sonnet I was simply justifying failure. However, I think this is only because I came to the project with a preconceived notion of what constitutes a sonnet’s poetic form. Consequently, ignoring a major element of that form—the rhyme scheme—I felt like I wasn’t writing a //real// sonnet. It really makes me question the idea of genre and what qualifies a piece of writing as a particular genre. I hit (or did my best to) all of the other identifiable elements, including meter, so intellectually, why can’t a sonnet be written in blank verse? The emotional versus intellectual reaction to my final draft is quite interesting and I don’t know what it means in terms of how I perceive my approach to and understanding of sonnets or genre. Although there are one or two places I kind of forced a syllabic stress, all-in-all I am pretty happy with my final version because I know it was the best I could do under the circumstances.