THROWBACK THURSDAY: Representative Government Poster

Throwback Thursday to a time when I wasn't afraid to draw people in profile but probably should've been.

(I didn't have access to a scanner tonight, so I'm afraid this is the best quality I've got, but the text is provided for you beneath the image!)

This text is centered.

Poster Title: Representative Government

Poster Text: Feel like nobody can hear you?

Little Girl: Mr. President! Down here!

Poster Text: Don't Worry! Your senator or House representative will speak for you. They've got you covered!

Little Girl: Don't forget to tell Congress about the turkeys!

Congressman: I won't.

I did a lot of artsy projects in middle school. The teachers were all into having us illustrate concepts, reenact historical debates, chart emotional highs and lows in stories, write songs about government styles... all kinds of crazy stuff. It was AWESOME. I loved to draw back then, too.

This was for my 8th grade Civics and Economics class. It was a pretty fun class. There were LOTS of crazy projects. For example, I had my first adventures with Apple's iMovie in Civics. The first project I did was a short documentary about the life of Ronald Reagan, using the biography I was assigned to read over the summer as the main source of information. Luckily for me, I decided to do Reagan instead of my first idea, Ulysses S. Grant, which was shaping up to be quite a dull project. The other project was a ten-minute documentary for National History Day about the life and tragic death of Jonathan Larson, the writer and composer of Rent. My partner and I spent some stressed-out hours in the computer lab for that project, but it did pretty well grade-wise and in the regional competition.

Comics were much more common assignments than the documentaries or other crazy stuff were. If you think about it, making a comic was a pretty tame assignment compared to some of things we did. I definitely had a lot of fun doing them, though, and sometimes I spent way too much time working on them.

The first time I can remember drawing a comic for homework was in 6th grade for either health or science class. Those were my first forays into sequential art. Since then, I've learned to a few things. As you'll see when I get my next Civics comic to the scanner, I've gotten much better at arranging panels. I also draw human faces better (usually. if I put in effort). Unfortunately, I still can't draw in faces in profile, but I can at least recognize a few things I was doing wrong back in the day. As for bodies, well... To be honest, I'm pretty impressed with how I drew the little girl in the comic. It's been a long time since I've drawn a human body I truly liked. Maybe I'm overcomplicating nowadays. Or maybe I just need to draw nothing but children.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Creative Comparisons

Hey, everybody! Now that I've graduated, I'm going to be at home for a little while, applying for jobs and such. One of my current projects is cleaning out my bedroom, and you would not believe the stuff I've been finding. I still have folders of schoolwork from middle school.

Some of things I've been finding are kind of fun, so I thought I'd share a few of them with the world before I send them to rest in a recycling bin.

I was kind of weird and awesome in middle school. I was in a gifted center and had some really good friends, so it was a very friendly environment. I always felt free to be my goofy self, and only rarely did I run into problems with bullies or otherwise mean people (and if people talked about me behind my back, I was blissfully oblivious). So I had a ton of confidence, but I also had no filter. I was always writing stuff without realizing how it would sound to the audience because I DIDN'T CARE WHAT PEOPLE THOUGHT OF ME! I WAS CREATIVE AND SWIMMING AGAINST THE CURRENT! I WAS BEING TRUE TO MYSELF!

Here's a little word of advice, kids: Yes, of course you should be true to yourself and you shouldn't let other people's opinions decide what you do, but if you're going to be writing something, you do need to think about the audience and how they're going to receive what you've written.

My first THROWBACK THURSDAY is a creative writing assignment I did in the first semester of seventh grade. The assignment was called "Creative Comparisons," and the object was to write comparisons without resorting to cliches like "white as a sheet" and "wide as saucers." I believe our teacher gave us a list of adjectives to use.

That's a fairly harmless and innocent assignment. There's not much damage you could do with that, right? I can only imagine Mrs. Spille's face when she read a few of the gems I turned in:

Katrina was as bitter as cocoa powder. She absolutely hated Stella Firestorm for Killing her parents. She refused to ever forgive her.

When John told Lyndzey that he didn't love her, she was as crushed as an egg under a T-rex's foot. She sobbed for days because he broke her heart.

Stella Firestorm was as cruel as a rabid vulture. Because of a tragedy in her childhood, the evil sorceress made the lives of all good people miserable.

When Katrina switched bodies with Stanley, she realized that his skin was as tough as leather. She found that she could run a sheet of paper over her fingers and not get a paper cut.

Katrina soon found that her future self was as wise as an old philosopher who had traveled the world. Older Katrina knew all the rules and tricks of magic, and she was an experienced fighter.

I had a bad habit of using characters from my personal writing projects in my creative writing exercises. They were also melodramatic, steeped in strange fantasy, and typically engaged in a fierce battle to the death. Mrs. Spille always wrote lovely comments on my assignments, but I know she must've been at least a little taken aback every time I spiraled off into weirdness.

I read a lot of Harry Potter and Redwall books when I was a kid. You might say they influenced my writing a bit.

Throwback... Wednesday.

I was just looking over something I wrote when I was in middle school, around eight years ago. So many laughable things. So many cultural references that didn't age well. So much awkward dialogue. All of the nonsensical moments that showed I really had no idea how the world worked.

Here are a few trends I've noticed from things I wrote in seventh grade:

-Really ridiculous names that I made up and for some reason thought were acceptable.
Like Mrs. Dunderead, or Joseph Landtro, who also went by "Jet Lawless" because he was the quarterback and all of the quarterback characters I ever wrote had flashy nicknames like that.

-Names that started with the letter K.
Katrina, Kaylee, Kyle... I just had a thing for the letter K, I guess.

-Characters who were bullied or who otherwise suffered from the wrath of the "popular" kids.
All the time. Even if the character in question was rich, friendly, and ought to have been one of the "popular" kids herself. This was a recurring thing in my writing, and I feel it had everything to do with the way TV shows and movies back in the day portrayed the bumbling teenage hero or heroine and the "popular" kids who were bound to be their antagonists. It baffles me how long it took me to realize that "popular" was not a good term for kids that everybody else hated. These movies and TV shows were all the experience I had about high school, so basically everything I wrote in a high school setting turned out cutesy and awkward.

-People who hiss things a lot
I had a creative writing teacher in middle school who taught a lesson one day about how much better it was to use creative verbs for dialogue instead of just using the tag "said" all the time. I still have very fond memories of this teacher, but basically every other creative writing teacher I've ever had has argued the contrary, and all of the books that are worth anything say the same. Unfortunately, since I picked up that habit so early in my writing career, I've had a hard time shaking it. I admit that my characters still hiss things sometimes, and it always sounds a little bit awkward.

-Many, many, many adverbs
Historically, I've used a lot of adverbs in my writing. And I never even imagined that there was something wrong with that until I had to read Stephen King's On Writing my senior year of high school. In one of the chapters in which King gives you writing tips, he tells you to limit the number of adverbs you use and try to use more descriptive verbs instead (although he admits that he, himself, is guilty of adverb use). When I read this, I was outraged. What on earth had adverbs ever done to Stephen King?! I filed this piece of advice away in my ever-growing "Stephen King Is Full Of It" file and continued to write as I normally did. At some point during that school year and in the months afterward, I began to notice how cutesy my adverbs made my writing feel. I tended to use them to make my dialogue tags sound more interesting (since I knew "hissed" wasn't good, but "said" still sounded too boring), and they made me sound like a really inexperienced writer. I've been getting better about the adverbs in the past few years.

-Sudden rainfall.
Rain that goes from zero to pouring in two seconds. No warning.

-Lots of cliches.
Cliche forehead-slapping, overused punchlines, scenes lifted out of every Disney Channel show ever (even when the shows were good)... A lot of the cliches were laughable.

-Strangely absent parents.
One reason that a lot of child protagonists are orphans is that the absence of attentive guardians makes it possible for them to go on their adventures. My protagonists' parents were not always dead, but they were often not around for dumb and nonsensical reasons, and they also didn't provide suitable caretakers to look after their children in their absence, leaving the child protagonists with much more freedom than any realistic pre-teen ever had (or should have).

-Characters who scream and yell things.
Lots of people screaming and yelling things. Like, come on, already. Inside voices. Stop freaking out. No wonder you're not one of the "popular" kids.

-Characters who gasp all the time.
SO DRAMATIC!!! WHAT A TWIST!!!

-Characters who sigh all the time.
Sigh...........................................................................................


A lot of my writing issues in seventh grade boiled down to my lack of worldly experience. They say that you should write what you know, and I knew nothing about high school, but insisted on writing about it. Despite living in the world, I apparently also knew very little about how normal people talked.

But at least I was writing! The best way to improve your writing, as eight years of data suggests, is to keep practicing and to always experience or research something before you write about it.

There are some things in my old stories that are laughable just because they were outdated. For example, characters using Internet Explorer. By choice. Ha! "How the times have changed," Rebecca hissed, rubbing her hands together and cackling evilly at the unused Internet Explorer icon on her desktop.