Genre: essay When most people think of worldbuilding, odds are they think of it as a garnish on the full-course meal of any given piece of fiction. After all, in most books people read and movies people watch, the characters are meant to be the primary focus – how the setting interacts with them is…

Genre: flash fiction I squint at the nagging blue glow of my screen, as I struggle to find the right words to put down on the Word page in front of me. It’s the wee hours of the morning, and outside of my dorm room window it’s pitch-black except for the dim orange fluorescent glow of…

Genre: audio podcast Transcript:  Hello. I’m not entirely sure how to start this, but my name is Drake Deen and I am a student at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Today I just kind of wanted to talk about writing and creativity in general.   I have a longstanding hobby/interest/passion of writing fiction…

Genre: poetry Formless The blank page regards me  With barely-hidden mirth  “Show me,” it says,  “What you’re made of.”  From the surface shine hints  Of words chained,  Straining against the drumskin  Of the pale white paper  Waiting to be released  It’s not quite so simple  Ideas take work  They don’t just grow on trees  Or…

Genre: 4-panel comic Reflection: It was interesting to examine the daily struggles of a writer's life through the medium of a comic. Often I have found myself writing out multiple chapters in one sitting, and then feeling dissatisfied with the entire work by the end of the day. In a way, putting the whole thing…

I am a freshman at Western Washington University, currently considering a degree in Linguistics, but who is still undecided about his own future. However, more importantly for the sake of this webtext, I have a hobby of writing fiction, whether short- or long-form. I began sometime in the second grade, over a decade ago, and since…

In exploring the five genres that I used in this webtext (namely: essays, flash fiction, poetry, audio podcasting, and single-page comics), I found that they are fundamentally similar in many ways. Each of them tells a story equally well, albeit in different fashions from each-other. I will say that the audio and visual realms allowed…