Reflections on the Thing I Wrote About Making Guacamole

All in all, I am happy with this as a first draft. It could have been better, but it could have also been much worse, considering the circumstances--I wrote it after a marathon bus ride/train ride/drive from Columbus to Chicago to Michigan City to Kalamazoo that got me home, bleary-eyed and tired, at 4 AM. Life lesson: when traveling, plan things. Anyway, I had a super gnarly headache when I woke up a few hours later, but I powered through it and focused super hard for around four hours and came up with a pretty solid piece of writing. I'm trying to become a more efficient, disciplined writer this quarter, and I did pretty well with this assignment. I only used the internet once for like thirty seconds the whole time, which is noteworthy to the point that I believe I deserve a medal or trophy of some sort.

Some other thoughts:

I am dissatisfied with the first couple sentences of the first paragraph. I think that's the weakest area of the piece.

There are several typos and omitted words. I failed to nail it in the proofreading department.

Upon reading it a few times and getting a comment from Kelsey, I realize that I'm probably going to change the ending. To be honest, I didn't know how to end it, so I just copied a paragraph from earlier in the piece that was funny and had an air of finality to it and decided to end it there. I see now that I accidentally wrote this piece with a theme (coping with anxiety and whatnot) so I will probably write a different ending that ties up this thematic thread and put the paragraph about the apocalypse back where it was.

I  used the words "guacamole" and "avocado" and "mashed avocados" so many times that they began to lose all meaning, kind of like when you say a word out loud too many times. I need to find more creative synonyms.

I also have no idea who would publish this thingamajig.

Ultimately, I think this was a character-builder of an assignment. I had some really nasty circumstances that probably would have sent me into a tailspin of failure (a failspin, if you will). However, I was able to buckle down and write a good first draft despite all of that. I think that part of being a good writer means digging in and producing good work no matter the circumstances, and I think I learned something about that this week.