Trippe Final Reflection

    Write On! was an interesting project for project week. I have always been interested in writing because I read a lot, but have never really gotten around to trying my hand at it. The first two days the group stayed in the classroom at New Hampton and learned about different writing styles. We heard the writer from the movie The Fighter speak about his motivation to write, which was very interesting. We learned about memoirs, creative writing, poetry, documentary, and receiving inspiration from artwork. On Wednesday, our group took a trip down to New Bedford to learn about the inspiration for the famous book Moby Dick. The author, Herman Melville, was inspired by his experience on a whaling voyage and used this experience in his portrayal of Ismail, the narrator of his book. He had the notion of whaling as "bad", which was a radical view in the days of whaling. Whalers believed that whales were dark, evil leviathans from the depths of the cold and terrifying sea. Melville's idea that whales were peaceful mammals definitely was not the common view. We went to Woods Hole down the Cape afterwards, and listened to Mr. McCollom's Uncle talk about writing for TV shows. This was interesting because he had a lot of information to pass on to us. He had worked with the writers for famous shows, including one of my favorites (Game of Thrones). On Thursday, we traveled to the AWP conference in Boston. There, we sat in on two conferences of our choosing to learn more about different writing inspirations. I personally did not take much from this part of the trip, but this was probably due more to my poor selection in conferences rather than the conferences themselves. That night, we attended a concert at the Berklee College of Music. This was a very impressive concert. It certainly inspired me, many of the women had incredible voices. We even saw a girl go HAM on the recorder. And there was a song with Kazoo's, which i guess was kinda cool.

All in all, this was an exciting project. I learned many things about writing that I did not know previously. I learned that when writing a memoir, using dialogue enriches the story. I learned that when writing a documentary, it is important to stick to facts but certain unimportant details can be created. Finally, I learned how art can inspire us to create. This was interesting to me in particular; art creating art.