Schadenfreude
Natalie M.
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When she visited our house for Christmas, my grandmother brought her collection of old newspapers documenting various historical events. She also brought some of my mother's yearbooks. My siblings and I eagerly looked through these. When I was looking for writing inspiration, I thought of those documents. I became interested in how large-scale newsworthy events coincided with the small-scale events of my parents' childhoods. However, once I started writing, the piece became very different from what I had intended. I found myself leaning more into the ideas of death, regret, and of course, schadenfreude. While it started almost completely non-fictional, I ended up changing and exaggerating details to better fit these themes, so it is now a fiction/non-fiction hybrid. It was actually my father's classmate who said to pour the spaghetti in the sink.
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Writing is an outlet for me to express my observations on the world. Rather than finding the explicit words to describe a concept, I can imply and illustrate it through creative writing. In other words, I can "show and not tell," allowing myself to explore my ideas and experiences with more nuance.
