My Writing

Core Competency Reflection

One strategy or activity that stimulates my imagination is…
To not think about the small details too much and fill my head with things that block out the imaginative ideas I would have. Instead, I focus on what the main structure of the story is and the direction it’s heading. If I find myself not coming up with any imaginative ideas, I will go to others and read their stories for ideas.

Some skills I have developed to make my creative activities better are…
To better utilize drafts. One thing I improved on from the past years is whenever I would write any length of a written piece, especially if it’s a story or something that involves creativity, I would jot everything I’m thinking on a separate draft paper and not worry about whether or not I should add these to the story. It’s much better to look at all my creative ideas on a sheet of paper rather than try to pick topics from my brain and add it to the final copy paper, and later worry about how I don’t like the way something is structured because of something I wrote in the first paragraph.

When I need to boost my mood or re-focus, I…
Take a break periodically. I tend to lose focus on my assignments frequently when I have to worry about homework from other classes. A strategy for focusing and finishing all my assignments is to work on one assignment for 30 minutes, take a 10 minute break, then do some other assignment for 30 minutes and repeat. This helps me stay up to date with everything and at peak creativity for all separate assignments, which then leads to less stress and boosts my mood as a result.

My goal I set for myself moving forward is to work on an area of study in which I feel confident to regularly challenge assumptions and develop new ideas.
Something I want to work towards is to step outside my comfort zone and develop ideas and work with topics that are a challenge to me; whether it’s a different style of writing or a high-level topic that advances what I usually like to work with. I can achieve this by always choosing the hardest topics or the ones I’m not familiar with in terms of relativity. I can start here and eventually this can lead to a more diverse imagination with many different creative ideas in a single written piece.