My Essential Question is how does an out of practice writer become an active, disciplined writer? I think that my Essential Question was changed to now focus more on how Coronavirus has affected my project. When I was first coming up with an Essential Question after my initial question was no longer feasible, I tried to overlook Coronavirus and ignore that it would affect my life. But in actuality, it’s shaped my process incredibly. I’ve mentioned this before, but my Senior Project would be very different if we weren’t in lockdown. Therefore, I believe that my question Essential Question should reflect this. In the beginning, I was looking to get back into just writing in general, but Coronavirus has really affected my ability to write, by affecting my ability to focus and get work done. This in turn has altered how much I wanted to write, which affected my writing as well. What I learned is that you can’t ignore a pandemic and pretend everything is normal. Instead I think I should to the opposite and incorporate the pandemic into my Essential Question. One thing I want people to know is that rather than fighting something, go with the flow, and allow it to take up time in your schedule. By fighting your feelings, you are actually losing time that you could be using to process your feelings and transferring that energy into productivity. I think that this was great practice for writing. It helped me realize what gets me in the zone, both mentally and physically, to write, which is incredibly helpful to my process. In this aspect, I do think that I answered my Senior Project. Of course there are so many answers to my original Essential Question. This was because I left it vague. As I explained previously, I was ignoring Covid-19 completely when creating my first Essential Question. So, looking back, I do not think it was a good frame for my Senior Project. It was way too general. I would now phrase my question as “How does a pandemic and quarantine affect an aspiring writer?”

I did adjust my expectations for Senior Project but this was because of lockdown. I do not know what my experience would have been like under different circumstances. I believe in this context, I met my goals. As I mentioned earlier I learned things about my process as a writer that I never knew before. Many of the challenges I faced regarded motivation and finding the mental capacity to sit down and focus only on writing. I overcame these by forcing myself to sit down and write a sentence at least every day. I know this would not be considered progress but I believe in the mindset that writing one more sentence is still one more sentence than you had yesterday. I also think that having deadlines were really helpful. For me, those deadlines were the workshop dates. But workshops were also challenges for me. I am very self critical, especially about my writing. Sharing writing and receiving critique is very difficult for me. But always reminded myself that our workshop space is very safe and to not take the constructive criticism personally. Especially since the workshops were very helpful. I believe that they helped me grow as a writer. Going into Senior Project I did not realize my focus would fluctuate so much. I would always get bursts of motivation at the most unpredictable times. I learned to always keep a little notebook handy to jot down all my ideas when I got one. I think that I will be taking a brief hiatus from writing. I am proud about my Senior Project experience. It has helped me grow in many areas. If I were to do Senior Project again, I would not choose to do writing, but rather a different topic. The hardest part of the entire process was building the motivation to write my short stories. Therefore, the most rewarding part of Senior Project was when I finished a short story.