Toward the Future/From the Past

1) As I was writing my play I found that it was easier than I thought it would be to use the play format. In the past, when writing stories in the normal format, there was much more description needed in order to characterize people and what not. In the play format you needed some description but what gave the reader the knowledge of what the characters were like was the dialogue. I didn't really find anything to be hard or limiting about the play format, and I guess I was surprised at how easy it was to write a play compared to a short story.

2) The advice I would give to a kid about 5 or 10 years old would be mainly to pursue what you want to in life. A lot of times, especially in middle school and high school, kids do things just to fit in; these can just be little things like the clothes you wear or larger things like going to a college just because it's supposedly labeled "cool" by your peers. I'd also tell him/her to not take life for granted and have as much fun as possible while still managing to make it into a few colleges that interest you. If you don't want to get straight A's, and your parents keep nagging you to get straight A's, don't get straight A's. Do what you want to do. This advice is solely based on my experiences that I've had in life and definetely not influenced by authority like parents, although parents can definitely have good things to say, I think it's more important to follow your dreams and do what you want to do. My advice is based off of the choices I've made, peer issues I've delt with and school.

3) Works of literature that end up lasting a long time need to have some sort of insight or knowledge that is revolutionary or that not many people, if any, know about. For example, in Huck Finn the idea of racism and slavery being a bad thing was a new, revolutionary idea at the time and that's why it's still being read in classrooms today. I could not see myself writing something like that because a lot of the issues and ideas that I could see myself writing about have probably already been worked on or written about and it wouldn't be very revolutionary. The only slight chance I have of writing a peice of literature that lives forever is if I live an extremely insane life and then write an autobiography about it, but even then the chance of that peice of work lasting more than a few years in one library is slim to none.