"Creativity and Collaboration: The Relationship of Fact and Fiction in Personal Writing"

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About the Author

Rachel Casey is an undergraduate student pursuing a degree in Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida. Her academic interests include the analyses of rhetorics involved in critical thinking, civic engagement, and feminist theory.

Contents

Introduction

Review of Literature on Creativity

Method and Approach

The Story

The Magazine

The Allegory

Conclusion

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Appendix E

References

The Allegory

In middle and high school, my writing style began to change. Taking cue from the “real stories by real girls” I had written for my magazine, my later writings included more realistic scenarios as opposed to imaginary, magical worlds. I wrote a short story about a competitive gymnast who would have been on her way to the gold if not for the setback of a broken leg. The realities from where I derived this fictional story are easy for me to identify. The protagonist was my age at the time (although bearing a different name, an extension of myself); I fostered dreams of someday becoming an Olympic gymnast (although then, I only took classes in basic tumbling); I loved the attention given to kids in my class with broken bones and sign-able casts (although I myself had never broken a bone). It is clear to me that this story plot posed as an amalgamation of realities I wished to experience.

Thus, I continued to write, crafting simple stories about fictional characters who, placed in realistic situations, resembled me in the nearest fashion. Around my sophomore year of high school, I started a story about a girl named Cassie, not me exactly but a character who mirrored my personality, my friends, and my fears. Cassie came from what I had deemed “a broken home,” while I still lived with both of my married parents; however, in deviating somewhat from my own life and situation, I found I was more fully able to express myself. I had placed my character in a situation which would only accentuate her personality traits—her stubbornness, her resilience, her loyalty—and draw them blatantly into the open for recognition. I gave her elements of my life, tweaking them just enough to fly under the radar. Writing in this style continued to hold a social purpose: the communication of my innermost feelings through the combination of reality with fantasy. My writings during this period focused more on a collaboration between imagined realities and personal life experiences, rather than existing authored texts. Nonetheless, in my analysis, these works I categorize as collaborative for their interactions with and awareness of my current disposition and social milieu.

However, writing in this plain, straightforward fashion as I had at seven years old did not hold my interest for long, as this escape into worlds beyond my own was no longer what I needed. Filled with anxieties about college decisions, impending due dates, and stressful life events, senior year of high school presented itself as an overwhelming time. I felt completely stuck, but unable to explain all those thoughts and feelings swimming around my cluttered mind, I had no way to release the tension that weighed me down. I needed an outlet for everything I kept bottled inside, and in the late stages of my high school career, I found that creative writing could also serve as this means of catharsis.

I wrote “The Poppy” in December of 2017 (see Appendix E). Trying to make sense of a death in the family, I used a newly-learned style of allegory to represent my coming to terms with and understanding of the event. The symbols I implemented—everything from the flower chosen to the characters’ names—alluded to the greater meaning of life and rebirth. And, as unique as my story may seem upon first glance, I, of course, did not come up with the allegorical writing technique all on my own. Assigned to read works like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphoses through my AP English Literature course senior year, I was led to the discovery of these new stylistic techniques, such as symbolism and allegory. I learned how ordinary colors can convey myriad emotions and how one seemingly simple plot can hold a whole other meaning entirely. These new writing styles so intrigued me, and I found myself sitting in front of my laptop to experiment with double meaning. It was through the work of others that I re-discovered my love of writing, my desire to create, my need for self-expression.

Being that, at this point in time, I was no longer seven years old, I did not copy the plot of my favorite books as I had done with Harry Potter; rather, I borrowed style, techniques, and themes. My new story resembled a physical journey like that seen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; my two characters, Eva and Batya, would “[walk] together to the flowers,” and this narrative, like Carroll’s, fully focused on the details of their journey. In touching on the cyclical nature of Eva and Batya’s “every Sunday” travels through the forest, my story contained “searching for meaning” themes like those seen in many of Kafka’s works. My story implemented religious undertones like those interwoven in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Both with names of Hebraic origin—Batya means “daughter of God” and the name Eva means “life”—my characters represented creation and rebirth similar to the generational new life in East of Eden.

This new story, “The Poppy,” was unquestionably my own; however, it too read as an amalgamation of myriad literary works, a product both my own and of the many authors who came before me. As shown, I expanded my writing repertoire through asynchronous collaboration with writing “experts” across the centuries and around the world (AIIM). Motivated by their writings and implemented literary devices, I participated in collaboration through the combination of these elements and inclusion of them into a new environment. Further, even when drawing inspiration from the works of existing authors, I continued to source main themes and ideas from my life, another source of collaborative activity. While I did not physically walk through the forest as my main character did with her grandmother, the written journey was based upon my emotional journey and gradual discovery of self throughout my senior year of high school. Thus, based on my own experience and analysis, it can be further hypothesized that, even within the most unique literary works by the most famous authors, there exist influences from reality, both experienced works and lived realities.