In Response to Fiction Packet 3 - Intro to Creative Writing

Fiction Packet three held writings that were extremely interesting. Starting with “When It Rains It Rains A River” it seems like the writer compares boys to boys, but not exactly. What I see is that the brothers in this story are the men, those fully grown and forced out into the world to fend for themselves. The rain symbolizing the idea that this world is crazy, there are always storms to brave through. And even though we may have imperfect minds and we always have room to grow, we are but children in this world no matter our age, playing in the mud that is life on this Earth. As the story goes on we read that the boys go to fish in the rain, make up a girl in the rain, they are muddy. I believe this to mean that the brothers, the men of the story make a living not only for sustenance, but to create a family. The world is dirty, and you have to get your hands dirty sometimes in order to create a life worth living. If not, you might as well be dead already.

“The Singing Fish”, the next writing in this packet is of course an extension of the previous pages. While the girl, the women are sound asleep and the men are out to hunt and gather, they come upon the singing fish, in other words, representation of miracles, knowledge, and confusion in this world.

As we go on to “What Our Mother Always Told Us”, the mud becomes something different. It becomes even more prominent. I believe this is where our parents, mostly our mothers try to protect us from the outside world. They wish us to be clean of this earth and its chaos, trying to do everything for us until we deny it so much they let us go out into the world. This story is interesting because not every mother would care, but ones like these make the world. Though they try to keep us clean, the human is a stubborn machine that decides upon itself to become dirty either way.

All of the stories, more so the ones beginning with “The Falling Girl” explain life in such a simplistic way from the point of view of children, mothers, teenagers and such. Talking about the beautiful and the ugly (both people and things in this world), It shows how people grow as the world grows.

Now why “Death of the Right Fielder” was cut short I could not say, it begins interesting but yet we are not given the next page by our packet. The story of a fielder in baseball, his presence not known and noticed right away, as he was face down on the ground, as there were several theories as to what killed him, but for some reason the very first the author lists is being shot…Extremely strange if you ask me.