Assigned Blog Post #1: Comfort Zone

I'll be honest, because apparently that's what this post is about. After I read the prompt I had a very difficult time trying to think of concepts I am uncomfortable talking about. People I've just met tend to find me awkward or shy (I realize most of you will strongly disagree...) but that's more an issue of not knowing what to say than not being willing to say it. I don't have an abusive father or an alcoholic sister or a dreadful family secret—actually, my family is about as stereotypical-white-family as they get—but as I kept the prompt in my head for a few days, I realized there are a few things I'm not a huge fan of discussing. Like that guy who asked me to homecoming sophomore year... That was pretty uncomfortable. Except he still exists so it's still uncomfortable. Or people who ask me about my relationship with my mom. That's probably the one thing I would least like to talk about so I should probably write about it at some point or another, probably through fiction. And a friendship in which a good friend and I were both in it for the wrong reasons. And that time in eighth grade when I wrote a card to a girl I really admired telling her how much she means to me (inspirational books always tell you to do that and I actually did, of my own free will) and she just gave me a bunch of awkward looks after that and I've barely talked to her since. And that calc test last year when I literally got 3 points on the entire second half of the test... actually, just talking about calculus at all makes my life just that much worse. For as much good as Tania has done me and continues to do for me, she's pretty darn good at bringing up topics I don't want to talk about- I guess I'm pretty uncomfortable with guilt. The thing is, though, that a reader will empathize so much better with a flawed character than a perfect one, and the most convincing flaws would be aspects of myself. Well I'll try.

In the prompt post, Ms. Cross says she has to "pretend my mother will never read a word of it" and that resonates with me a lot. Because probably my mom will read it, and probably she will share it with a bunch of people with whom I am only vaguely acquainted and they will also read it, and they will come up to me at some point and say "oh I was reading your poetry and-" and I'll already be very annoyed. And then I will have an agitated confrontation with my mother. And then...

That's why I don't like talking to or about my mother.

How much truth surfaces in my writing? I don't know. There goes this entire blog assignment, huh. I haven't written much fiction before, or when I have it's been based on characters to portray an idea- very specific characters that I thought up after thinking up the idea, and they may not have been convincing at all because I had such a specific way I wanted them to be. I guess we'll see then how much honesty I am able to incorporate into my fiction, and how much I am willing or able to push myself out of my comfort zone in order to make convincing characters or interactions between them. Hmm