Project Reflection

Project Description
For the past few months Stephen Sellers sophomore humanities classes have been
studying WW1 and WW2. During the most recent four weeks of this time we worked on a
project called Creative Historians. We studied almost all of the components of the war and with
that retaining information we were assigned to write a short fictional writing piece. For this
project we chose a specific event that took place during either WW1 or WW2. After we chose an
event we wrote a Creative Historians Research Notes paper which helped us to learn everything
that we could about that event which was later a great component to the short stories that we
wrote. Once our notes were finished we began writing our short story. Our stories had to be 5-7
pages long and had to have a round character with life issues and desires. The character had to
be experiencing change and experience the event in the war which we had chosen. With all of
this information about war and our individual writing goals and ideas we wrote out Creative
Historians Fictional Story.
Literary Strengths
Throughout my fictional writing piece I wrote with lots of literary elements. One of the
main literary elements that I used was round characters. I designed my character to have a
strong passion in helping people but in a safe civilized environment. In my story the character
goes through a series of events of beginning nursing training when then she is drafted as a
medic into the war. She goes through a very emotional time and experiences many things that
scar her forever. She has desires and dreams that can not be fulfilled because of the
circumstances of her being drafted into the chaos of the war. As my story progresses the
character has to adjust to her new life and is forced to accept it. An example of her personality
changing through the story is, Being the first sign of hope and rescue for someone helplessly
laying in a mound of dead bodies made me feel good inside. I liked helping people and it
seemed like it was helping me. I think that this quote expresses how the character changes her
perspective and turns a negative into a positive. This element is very important to my short to
show emotion and give the perspective of someone who is shy and timid making their opinion
loud with actions and emotions.
Literary Weakness
In the short story that I wrote I think that my literary weakness is the integration of
historical events and facts. This is my literary weakness not because the information was
inaccurate but because I think that I could have very easily integrated more information and
events. This element could have been integrated more if I focused on the historical events that
were taking place instead of only focusing on the characters feelings and emotions. While
writing this story I felt like I had so many good ideas for what to happen next that a lot of the
time I forgot to incorporate more historical elements. I also think that an element I struggled with
was plot. I wrote my story with so many exaggerated ups and downs that it was kind of hard to

follow an original plot arc with the developing problem, rising action, climax, and resolution that
it was tough for me to write a well structured plot. I overcame the difficulties of my plot by taking
a little detail away from the rising actions and putting a lot of emphasis on the climax to easily
show that it was my climax in the mix of my up and down story.
Story Revisions
In the writing of my story I went through several drafts to perfect my work to the best of
my ability. I think that the main revision I made to my story was correcting the tense of the story.
I wrote the story in past and present tense and had to change it to all the same tense. I rewrote
my story as if it were a present tense narration to the main character. For this revision I went
through and edited almost every sentence to make it flow and stay be present tense. I had
several peer critiques and had family members edit my paper every other day that I edited and
put more work into my story. Another important and dramatic revision I made was adding detail.
While rereading my story and going through it I took specific words like boom and looked up
synonyms like explosion or blast to make my story more creative. With changing one word
in a sentence changed the whole structure of it making it more exciting.
It was July 28th, 1914 when the first explosion filled the air with smoke and sent a ripple of
vibration through the dirt blanketing the earth; sparking the First World War. Just by adding a
few more descriptive words to my story like I did in the sentence above make my story become
vibrant and alive.