Metacognition: Writing My Short Story

We haven't done creative writing in English class for years, so the idea of actually doing some creative writing this year sounded like a great idea. However, I soon learned that creative writing in high school is a lot different than creative writing in junior high. The process of writing my short story was a lot more difficult that I thought it would be. Currently, my beginning story fragment is not even in my story. The premise has completely shifted from what I originally had wrote. This really surprises me. However, I know Mr. Allen had said that this would probably be true and I think this change in the story was for the better. I learned how to create "emotional pressure" on my characters and how to create a solid conflict in the middle of the story. I was very surprised at the amount of work it took to create a solid conflict that would not result in a "therapy session" (in the words of Mr. Allen) and actually write something that could potentially hook readers. I like how we took this story in steps. Writing a portion and then coming back to it a week later gave me time to think about the next part of the story and play off of what I had originally wrote. It surprised me that this method worked well because I originally thought we would write the whole story in about a week but the schedule of writing only parts at a time has worked out very well for me. Next time, I think I would like to think out my story fragment a little bit more because I feel as if it was almost useless now and feel like I might have rushed writing it. I would also make sure that I had a better general idea where my plot was going after I had written my beginning. Other than those few things, I would have to say that the short story writing process went very smoothly for me and surprised me along the way!