Herds Final Portfolio Daniela Rodriguez Herds Final Portfolio Daniela Rodriguez | Page 6

Motionless

Q1 Fiction page 18

I wrote this piece when I woke up at 5 am. in the morning. It was a normal night in which I had a plain glass of milk for dinner and the went to sleep. I started to have this really weird dream, which I couldn’t repeat right now because I don’t remember, but I wrote it down because it was too shocking. A nightmare. The only thing I remember was waking up sweating, all my blankets were off of me, and my eyes were watering. I ran to the switches in my wall, turned on the light, and then headed to my bathroom. I splashed some water in my face and ran to my room so I could write the astonishing story. I had just remembered that I needed to begin a piece for Mr. Chase’s class, and I had the perfect story. This piece is relevant to my portfolio, because a part of the story has to do with my parents. I guess I my parents behavior influenced how I dreamed that day (I wish I could say they didn’t). The corrections of this piece were very hard for me, because it was something that I lived vividly, so changing it was like changing the essence of the piece, which I didn't like. I tried my best to not change some of the most important parts, but I needed to. A quote I thought was very cool and interesting of me to put it in there was “For five minutes, she stared at herself, in mobile. She knew she could move, but she didn’t want to… She was too scared to go back to her nightmare.” I liked this quote because besides being the last sentence that engages the reader, it brings me a lot of memories.

Dinner

Fiction Q1 Fiction page 16

This is one of my summer pieces. I got really inspired after watching a really cool short film. The short film made you see it from the end to the beginning, everything was rewinded. As I could see the short film you could see a man walking into his house and leaving his keys, but it slowly turned around the situation and you could see how the man was actually mistreating his wife. It was really deep and made me think that I could do something similar. I really had a hard time writing this story so it would make some sense, and in the end it kind of did. It’s somewhat confusing but I think you can get the idea. It is not rewinded like the short film (I don’t know how I would do that) but it has some of the traits and characteristics that I saw in the film. I had to revise this piece a couple of times, because I wanted to capture the essence of the sweetness of the family, before everything turned around. I feel this piece is very strong because the whole story changes around and you don’t notice it until the end. The piece gives you hints that something is wrong but you don’t really know what. A quote that I found really good from this piece was “There was blood everywhere, in the kitchen, in her own hands, even on her favorite bumble bee apron, so she decided it was clean up time.” This quote is like I mentioned earlier, one of the parts that gives you a clue that something is wrong, or that is just not supposed to be written.

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