Writing Meeting: 07/08/2014

We met last night for the first time in a long while. It was so pleasant to get back to it. Had we not edited any work, it would have been a pleasure just to talk about our writing. But we did edit. Not a whole lot, but the several pages or more I had written. One thing I find that drives me in my writing, is just feedback. Whether it’s positive or negative, feedback inspires me. I have to fix what was rubbish, or I have to build on what was received positively. Most of last night’s feedback was positive. I’m pretty excited. A lot of what’s going to be driving this short story is falling into place really well, and the character development is flowing pretty naturally.

We discussed whether it was proper English to capitalize the first letter, after a quotation, when the dialogue ends with an exclamation point or a question mark. For example: [“What’s your name, anyway?” she asked.] See how the quotation ends with that question mark, but there’s still a bit of the sentence after it? According to all the sources we checked online, it is proper writing to finish that sentence off by not capitalizing the word that follows the dialog in quotation marks. Which makes perfect sense to me. That end mark is only bringing the quote to a close. Should the writer continue the sentence, that end mark would affect only the sentence within the quotation marks.

I’m excited to write the next scene in the story. One fun tidbit is I’ll be looking back at the things I’m learning in my Sociology studies as a way to reinforce the writing. Several concepts concerning much of what I’m writing about are things I’m actually learning about as I study for my upcoming test. It’s one of moments for me when I realize there really is a point to all the learning I’m doing. Some of the tests I have to take, I scratch my head wondering why it’s important, but for some reason my writing never seems a viable reason for learning some of this stuff. That is, until moments like this come up and I’m just tickled pink.

We distributed new prompts, as the old ones were stale and uninspiring. We can always go back to those later anyway. I had so many ideas for the last one, but none of them ever came to bloom. This new one has a number of possibilities though, and I’m looking forward to taking it on. That is, if I have a chance. I might just be furiously bashing out all this epic stuff for my short story for the next two weeks!