WRITING PORTFOLIO

This writing portfolio features five pieces of writing that I have created during my high school career. It is a diverse collection of a poem, and a few short stories. Each of these pieces connect to a different part of my identity as a writer. Along with that, I have a series of drafted writing projects I am currently editing. Each piece is in a specified format connected to a specific number. 

This poem reflects some deeper emotions that I have felt throughout this A.I. revolution we have been experiencing these past couple of years, feelings that I cannot quite put into words in the traditional sense, so I crafted an abstract poem about them. It is based on “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman, a piece that also uses flowery language to try and capture something that cannot be encapsulated by normal words.

My first short story is a snapshot of a possible dystopian future if A.I. continues to be implemented into our lives like it is today, a fear of mine that I have lost a lot of sleep thinking about. I was inspired by dystopian short stories like “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, but I put my own personal, modern spin to create a new version of the commonly portrayed dystopia. 

My second short story comes from a collection I did where I randomly generated a single word every day for ten days and wrote a story based on that word. I did this as a general response to the idea of writer’s block. People often complain about not having ideas, but the human mind is so powerful that it can generate a story from almost any source, even a single word, which means the only limit to a story is your own creativity.

This short story was an assignment for school. Specifically, it was to write a story based off a historical essay we had completed earlier in the year. I had written my essay on the British Occupation of India during the 1800s, an important topic to me because it actively shaped the history and legacy of my family. I wrote this short story to imbue some of the desperations and struggles that I felt when researching this era of my country’s history into a character who actively experienced this era.

This final short piece is a flash fiction story that I wrote for a writing competition at a local library. The prompt was to write the hook to a story, what would be the first chapter of a novel. I based this hook off of my original idea for my book series. I eventually strayed away from almost all aspects of this story, but I still think that the idea of it is really cool and something I may even expand on later.