In our Creative Writing unit,
we read short stories from many authors such as Edgar Allen Poe. After reading many of these short stories, we were given a chance to write our own, but this time with our own style and imagination. I know for a fact that having an idea from another (famous/superior) author helped improve my writing strategies more than ever! It gave us a chance to focus on sounding more like the author and giving our audience the same effect as the author did. We also did many creative writing activities, such as writing down our strengths and weaknesses. We worked on an exercise where we wrote down what specific topics we felt we lacked in with our writing skills; we then had to try our best to write about those topics. I feel that this was very helpful because it made me feel more confident in my writing. We also gave each other good, constructive criticism on our short stories, which was very useful to better our writing.
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Below, you'll see three examples of authors we studied and whose styles we tried to emulate. Enjoy!
by Nina Pitonakova
Who was T.S. Eliot?
by Keely Sullivan
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis for eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Paris, having earned both undergraduate and master’s degrees at Harvard. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe, married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London.
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In London Eliot began working with Ezra Pound, his biggest influencer, who recognized him and his poetic talents. Ezra Pound also assisted in publishing his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet.Eliot's reputation began to grow tremendously by 1930. The next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literacy in the English-speaking world. His poems in many ways articulated the disappointment of a post–World War I generation with the literary and social values of the Victorian era. Click the button below to read our poems in the style of T.S. Eliot!
Who was Edgar Allan Poe?
by Sydney Schiller
In October, our class was able to write in the style of one of the most famous poets (and in my opinion the OG emo kid) Edgar Allen Poe. Learning to write his style was a fun challenge as we not only had to channel our inner dark sides but learn how to write poems in iambic pentameter which gives his poems that eerie effect. In addition to learning how to write poems, and short stories in this style we were able to pick his brains and learn about the history of his unique style and tragic life that were ultimately the inspiration for many of his works such as The Raven.
Click the button below to read our Gothic poems in the style of Edgar Allan Poe!
Who was Kate Chopin?
by Flower Cintron
Kate Chopin was an American author of various short stories and novels. These stories are based in Louisiana during her time. She lived from February 8, 1850 to August 22nd, 1904. She is considered by scholars to have been a forerunner of American feminist authors. In class, we studied the short story "Désirée’s Baby". The main themes of this short story are racism, gender, and hypocrisy. The story is based on an abandoned baby who was found by Madame Valmonde, a wealthy woman from a French family. She finds the baby lying down by the gate outside her house. Valmonde raises the young baby, and she turns into a beautiful woman and is courted by the son of a wealthy French family, Armand. They get married and have a child, but when the child is born, the child is black. Armand shows cruelty towards both Désirée, his child, and the people he has enslaved. The story goes on and it turns out that his wife is not the one with Black ancestry but it is himself. His mother had an affair and the ancestry ran through himself. These ideas of irony made the short story truly amazing and in class, we discussed that because the stories that Chopin writes revolve around her life, and growing up in Louisiana, this story may have something to do with something she experienced. Since the story ends with a cliffhanger, we each wrote an "alternate ending" to "Désirée’s Baby". Click the buttons below to read Chopin's original story and our alternate endings!
