Chris Ortega - Week 10

During the course of my time here as a tutor, I’ve mostly been helping people write academic essays. Due to their nature as academic assignments, the process of helping students always starts with looking at the prompt itself, or maybe a rubric, and branching off from there.

That standardized process doesn’t really fit working with fiction, which is what a certain student of mine has brought to our sessions. They are writing adaptations of translated stories, and they didn’t ask me for ideas on how to best meet the notes of the assignment. Instead, they wanted to talk about the process of creating a good story and how they could do so. 

To that end, we both spent the bulk of a session together just talking through their story and the many details they wanted to add to it, trying to see how everything would fit together. In another session, they brought their newly written story and we started to talk about how the story might impact readers.

These were interesting sessions. It was great to be able to see a story being formed from the ground up, and how pieces of feedback leave tangible marks on the story that usually only the author knows about.

I look forward to helping more people with artistic and literary writing as a tutor.

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