Hazel Smith/Exercises In Style pt. 2

Right from the very beginning, I found this Hazel Smith reading to be informative and enlightening to me as a writer. Smith's suggestions on narration were especially helpful because personally, I suck at figuring out how to work with narration and I need a little guidance every once and awhile. I never really realized how in-depth narration can be either, until I read this selection. My mind was completely blown by all of these different types of narrating styles, because in previous English classes we had only gone over very basic narration styles such as first and third person. I also found "the arrow of time" to be a very helpful section because as a writer I have struggled with time and figuring out when to use past, present, and future correctly. The next article was also helpful because even recently with my Auto-Biography, I spent some time trying to fix the order of events that I was using. At first they were all over the place and I had a tendency to jump around a lot, which could definitely cause confusion with any reader. Going from present, to past, back to present, and then the past again was something that I found to be an easier pace to keep up with my own writing.

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I've found all of these exercises to be quite interesting, and very inspiring as well. The way Queneau works with words is amazing, especially with "Rhyming Slang". I found that piece to be the most enjoyable personally of the second half of the book. With a lot of the exercises though, I do feel like random words were just tossed around and I can't really understand the piece at all which just makes me frustrated for the most part. An example of one of the pieces that frustrated me was, "Back Slang". I just did not understand it or it's purpose at all, and I guess that's just a technique that I'm not used to, but still, it just was not connecting with me. The other day I was speaking with a friend, and we were comparing art to creative writing. My friend said she found it hard to appreciate art at all because she felt as if a majority of it was just "thrown together". I agreed somewhat with this statement, because I find it hard to discover meaning in anything where it isn't just thrown at you in someway. I then brought up this class and I discussed some of the activities and readings we have done in class, and how I find it hard to appreciate some of them because I didn't understand them. I think it's easy for people to just thrown something under the bus because they don't understand it completely, which is essentially what I am doing. I am trying to be more open-minded with the readings we are doing, such as Raymond Queneau's and find appreciation in them, but it is definitely hard. I believe comprehending the importance of these writings is critical to help grow as a writer though, so I'm not going to completely give up on understanding this literature. It just has to grow on me a bit more. Overall though, I did enjoy Queneau's exercises and think they did help to inspire me with the play of words, and hopefully I will be able to light this shine through in my future writings.