12/3: Revising Out Cliches

Listening to a few famous contemporary writers give advice:  from Literature: Craft and Voice (http://www.mhconnectenglish.com/Delbanco/)

Take notes on what these authors have to say about the writing process...

1. John Updike

2. Richard Ford

3. Jamaica Kincaid  ("Girl")

4. Amy Tan

Defy Expectations to Defy Circumstantial Cliché (Writing Exercise)

·      In the past few weeks, to inspire the start of a story, I’ve asked you to think about putting characters close to their situations (ex.: make the MC a climatologist in a story that thematically discusses global warming); however, doing so can often set us up as writers to simply go through the motions of what would be expected if we so closely attach the characters to plot, or plot to characters. We may have a story that is structured well, but we may also bore our readers with a lack of surprise. We can call this plot cliché, or circumstantial cliché (one of other writing clichés discussed in Writer's Digest).

·      So, consider as you revise your well structured story so that it now has a stronger voice and a few more crafty, expectation defying moment.  First, look at these examples and think about:  1. What is generally expected from this character type and/or from this scenario?  2. How may I use the situation or setting to discuss a different conflict between characters than what might be expectedly going on in the larger setting amongst all characters?

o   Ex.: If your story takes place at a funeral, make the story less about the dead person or how people are sad for their loss, etc., Instead, what are some surprising things that one can imagine (or have experienced) that have gone on at funeral?

o   Ex.: You have a story revolving around the head cheerleader and the start quarterback of the high school (or college) football team. What is the easy, stereotype of their relationship? How might you take the story in some less expected directions? 

§  For example, on my example: maybe the QB is more interested in history classes than he is sex or beer or abuse!  

For 12/3

We will discuss "How do writers create suspense?" by discussing two short stories famous for their suspense and their ends:

1. Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour"

2. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-tale Heart" 

For each story, I want you to record three (3) main points about how each author created suspense using foreshadowing techniques and the chosen point of view.

Preparing for Fiction Workshop

Six student stories, three hours, one day: can we accomplish it? Yes! That's about 25 minutes per student (to leave time for the next week's homework being assigned). 

Here are a few links I find helpful to my own fiction writing pursuits; hopefully, they will help you as both a fiction writer and a peer reviewer:

1. Kurt Vonnegut's Essential Tips for Short Story Writing

2. The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Bonnie Jo Campbell

The Workshop  (Do these things before 11/26)

•       For each story, I would like you to comment on one (1) major complication (from our textbook) that you feel must be addressed, as well as give some advice on how you’d like to see the story revise this issue. Make a positive suggestion about where you see the story having a possibility of covering _________.  Of course, make a note in the margins where that major complication exists.

•       For each story, make sure to praise what you see as the strongest quality of the piece – as well as point to a place in the story that fulfills that quality.

•       Make no more than three (3) editing marks – the writer needs to proofread their own work. However, do make a comment about specific errors you find them repeating.  Example:  “In proofing your story, concentrate on using simpler sentences because you have a lot of run-ons.”

•       At the end of the story, make this comment for each story: “If this was my story, I would have ___________ happen.” Discuss something you would do with the characters or the plot – the basic narrative arc of the piece.

•      This comment is not so much a critique, but a way of opening up the writer to different possibilities of what to do with their piece!

•       Was the climax predictable? What surprised you? Give your general reaction to the story’s arc IF you haven’t already done so.

•       Was the diction and dialogue believable?

•       Did you like the character’s names? Characterizations?

•       What, from writers like Vonnegut and Campbell, can you pass on specifically to each writer? 

HW for 11/19: Restraint | Balance

Your own short stories are due (six copies) next week. Below are two contemporary, award-winning authors whose stories can inspire your narrative's style, organization of plot, and conflict.

Among other things, these authors "write what [they] know"; Campbell is a born and bred Michigander and Diaz was born in the DR and raised in Jersey. Each uses these hometowns for the settings of their stories, which allows them to focus on the plots themselves.


Bonnie Jo Campbell's American Salvage was the 2009 National Book Award winner. The collection supports the lesson that a writer can imaginatively explore contemporary life with restraint.

Restraint in plot is important. You do not want to overstretch the action happening in your story, especially if you are not writing with a fantasy, sci-fi, magical realist slant. 

1. Read "The Trespasser" from Campbell's collection to discuss next class. Pay attention to how she transitions from the past to the present using flashbacks. We'll talk about how her organization and use of 3rd person POV allows for us to see two parallel stories of two of the characters. 

Junot Diaz won the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a story about a fantasy fiction-loving main character who has bad luck with woman and who does not live up to what it means to be a Dominican male. Diaz was chosen as a MacArthur "genius" grant this year.

2. I'd also like you to read Junot Diaz' "Alma," which gives you a larger view of today's literary landscape. Diaz writing style is, to say the least, less restrained than Campbell's in many ways.

Here in Diaz' story, we see contrast. Reading contrasting style is necessary for one's writerly growth. Despite the unrestrained dialogue and exposition for which Diaz is becoming more infamous, the plot of "Alma" is quite basic.

Character Sketch & HW for 11/12

Exercise: Working on our own Characterization Skills

·       First, pick a local setting: imagine that place, and what detail you need to clarify setting. Write down:  1. One sound that takes precedence.  2. One image that your character might turn their attention to at some point.  3. A smell a character might notice in this place

·       Second, chose the plot point. Write down: 1. Why are they at this place? 2. Are they here with someone, alone, etc.?

·       Third, provide the physical description:  1. Gender, height, age, skin tone, body type.  2. One to two body parts that represent this personal’s overall character well.

·       Fourth, how does your character react to having to come to this place? Write down the one main thought that comes into your characters brain.

·       Fifth, what is your character’s favorite word or phrase? Write this down.

·       Sixth, how does your character act in public, around people? Write down: 1. What is his or her physical reaction the first time they meet someone.  2. How do they react to someone they dislike? 3. What is their main defense mechanism for dealing with conflict?

·       Seventh, imagine a second, minor character that your character does not like! Write down only their name and the main reason they have a problem with this person.

·       Eight, now you can spend time focusing on crafting your character and how you want readers to see them by using the above information to draft a brief scene (around 2-3 paragraphs?) …

For next Monday, 11/12: 

• Bring in your Character Sketch revised (About 1 paragraph) to share with the class. What did you work on with the character; who was real template for the character? 

• Read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" and mark the points in exposition and dialogue where "magical realism" exists. In essence, mark the places where the world and its physical rules are defined without being over-explanatory.

• Read Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the PO" and note the differences in Welty's use of narrator/POV, dialogue and tone from both Marquez  and Hemingway.

56 analogies & Hemingway homework for 10/29

As we transition from writing poetry to writing fiction,  let's practice by starting a short short of about half a page to one page, single-spaced, based on one of the "56 Worst/Best analogies of high school students." 

Scour this list for an analogy that inspires the beginnings of a plot to you. Focus on using the analogy to extend -- and demonstrate -- the five elements of plot.

Also, consider the humor (for some, accidental) inspired by the writing style used by the high school author. Try to mimic the analogy's sentence structure (syntax) in drafting your story, as well as the overall voice created by the analogy. For some (only some) clarity, look at these examples

Examples:

9. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.  --> This writer mocks, or satirizes, the "her" for a lack of eloquence with, like, "California Girl" dialect!

10. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef. --> The humor in this analogy is different from the above in that the writer does not mock, but does use a hyperbolic and grotesquely inappropriate image. In short, the image is a negative way of "growing" on someone -- which I don't think the HS writer intended!

Reading Homework for 10/29: Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants."    (Also, same story is linked here in a different format.) We will use EH's story to discuss more fiction elements. Answer the following questions:

·      What are our characterizations of The American and the girl?

·      How does Ernest Hemingway use exposition to help shape his characters?

·      Where does most of the action take place in story? What about the lack of physical action is significant to our understanding of these characters?

·      What are some of the ways the reader finds meaning in the dialogue – both what is said and how the characters speak to each other?

White Space | NoSpace example

Richard Siken is the author, and here is a link to the poem in its original form: http://undertowmagazine.com/scheherazade-richard-siken/

For quick background on who Scheherazade: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheherazade

White space | NoSpace example

Emergence and Emergency (by Brian Russell)

It was a simpler time then when  

We were simple things   alone in the world we  

Performed the rote tasks of our singular

Existences   once a week I walked a block

To the laundromat with my sad sack

Of used clothes while you pushed a sorry cart

Piled high with frozen food   

We were two planes on the same path at

Different altitudes   we were two trains leaving

Union station at 3:17 on different tracks bound

For the dusty towns of someone else’s past 

We weren’t meant to meet but did

My hand already charting a careful course

Up your blouse   you warned me

This is going to get complicated

You were right

I don’t know what’s going to happen

To you next   I hardly

Sleep   I can’t

Develop a routine   I want you to live

Forever or at least longer than

Me   which is the only child

Of forever   I don’t regret

Anything   our complexes   our love

In the face of certainty.

Literary Magazine Reviews

Below are a few places to review for...how to write a review of a literary journal, including examples of how to cite lines. However, there are some different expectations and considerations for you when citing lines within the MLA, academic format. For instance, you will need to incorporate line(s) citation and you may want to save space in your essay by citing 2-3 lines using the / to indicate linebreaks or // to indicate stanza breaks. Also, you will not want to drop quotes, just like in any other college essay.

Line break example:  "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky /

• from TS Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Stanza break example:  "...fearing the chronic angers of that house, / / Speaking indifferently to him,"

• from Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays"

Here are the actual journal review links:

1. http://www.newpages.com/literary-magazine-reviews/2012-09-18/#Assaracus-7-July-2012
2. http://www.thereviewreview.net/reviews/reader-prepare-fall-love
3. 
   

Ekphrasis Poetry, 10/1

Poems that respond to or describe a piece of another art form are called ekphrasis poetry.  Beyond personal memory or current events, the art world can serve as a healthy muse for writers.  

• Perhaps you may respond to themes in the work that strike you
• Does the piece deal with a familiar topic (such as elegy or ode, love or hate, ...)?
• Is there a striking image?
• Does color or another element in the piece strike you?
• Language use that strike you?
• Melody in a song inspire you (Ever listen to classical music and envision a scene in your head?)?
• ...

Here are two general links to ekphrasis poems:

1. Poets.org 

2. Poetry Foundation


Here is a link to a famous Peter Blume piece at the Art Institute of Chicago: "The Rock"

• Let's read the copy that goes along with this piece, but then practice our own responses through a poem draft.

Elegies and Odes: 10/1 in-class discussion

Elegies

1.  James Reiss' "The Breathers"

2. Joan Larkin's "Afterlife"

3. Jericho Brown's "Another Elegy"

4. Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Meditations on the South Valley: Part XX"

5. A.E. Housman's "To An Athlete Dying Young"

6. Mary Jo Bang's "You Were You Are An Elegy"

7. Yusef Komunyakaa's "We Never Know"

Odes

1. Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead"

2. Pablo Neruda's "Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market"

3. Alexander Pope's "Ode on Solitude"

4. Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day" (Read for Obama's inauguration)

5. John Keats' "To Autumn"

6. Kevin Young's "Ode to the Midwest"

7. Anne Sexton's "In Celebration of My Uterus"

Sonnet Examples

Here, the Poetry Foundation has a great page for you to explore further.

As for our second goal of the day, to introduce the idea of sonnets, we will look at another Jehanne Dubrow poem (one that she read and has stayed with me since last spring's reading): "Non-essential Equipment"

Here are some other modern sonnets for your inspiration:

1. "Death and Taxes" by Urayoan Noel

2. "Interstate Sonnet" by Carl Marcum

3.  "And Indians" by Glyn Maxwell

4. "The Consent" by Howard Nemerov

5. One of the best modern English poems: James Wright's "Saint Judas"

As we will discuss, sonnets were historically seen, thematically, as addressing the ideals of love. Therefore, love today's activities all coalesce into a big love festival!

Epistolary Poems: Assignment 2 examples

The Poetry Foundation has a great link to epistles/epistolary poems (also called letter poems or verse letters):  click me!

Here are a few poems from the first Latino winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets (most prestigious American award for a 1st book of poetry), Eduardo Corral, who is reading in DC tonight while we cover the letter poem:

1. "To Robert Hayden"
2. "To the Angelbeast" and an interview that gives us insight into the title's allusion to Hayden's poetry 

Also, check out "Love Letter (Clouds)" by Sarah Manguso.

And, Dorothea Lasky's "Poem to an Unnameable Man."

Because I write many epistolary poems, and because these two are linked, I am sheepishly using here are two examples: "To Mockery:" and "To Failure:"

Here is another "To Failure," this time from a famous poet -- the poet Philip Larkin.

To further my teacherly ego, here is a poem from Verse Daily, originally published in Columbia Poetry Review, where I was editor (and chose this poem for publication): "Black Iris"

To seal the ego -- um, I mean -- deal, here is a poem published by a grad-school mate, Ian Harris: "XOXO Los Angeles"

Example A from class' Exquisite Corpse

I would be little Alex from "A Clockwork Orange". I don't wish this to reflect his behavior, but he is a thrill seeker, and...

My friends call me a droog.

If I could obtain a superpower, it would be time travel, so I may go back in time and right wrongs that have been unleashed upon my city

self-absorption has poisoned our youth!

A wet nose, soft fur, and a hundred licks from Reina the Siberian Huskey keeps me sane.

Softly, sure-footed, I swiftly climb the mountain ridge, howling to my pack, fur ruffling in the crisp air.

The abstract perfection of natures hiccups. That result in asymmetrical form, in what is normally symmetrical and perfect. A beauty in the deformity making it unique.

The Rudy Giuliani Game

Vice President Joe Biden, in his run for presidency, once quipped during a Democratic debate that former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani made his own presidential candidacy out of saying three words: a noun, a verb, and 9/11.

Putting politics aside, Biden's critique does imply the power of two things: 1. A historic event and it's connotations, and 2. the simple sentence!

How can this help our writing? Quite simply, we are going to use he Rudy Giuliani method to brainstorm a handful of possible "non-traditional patriotic images"for Essay 1.

Here are the simple steps of the The Rudy Giuliani Game:

1. Draft a simple sentence using:  a noun, a verb, a preposition (on, during, after, ...) and 9/11.

2. Repeat this formula five to ten times, so that you will have a list for the class to discuss which images both surprise and engage us as an audience.

Here are a few examples of how students have responded to the game in the past. For one, we can see powerful, serious, and evocative images created out of such a simple exercise:

• Flags fly on 9/11.
• Shadows died after 9/11.
• Firefighters fought on 9/11.
• Dust settled after 9/11.
• Strangers cried on 9/11.
• Doors opened on 9/11
• Pens wrote because 9/11.

Event Poems [examples]

Poems can arise out of the writer's meditation on those typical events -- birthday parties, weddings, national holidays, religious events (not just holidays but ceremonies and rituals within a church, such as Catholic communion or a bar or bat mitzvah) -- but also out of historical happenings that in someway help define a culture, an era, a country -- 9/11, the Cold War, Desert Storm, the Exxon Valdez spill, the Million Man march, and more.

Below are a few poems of which we can see how an event can be inspire a poem that goes beyond just the event. and uses facts and details about and from the event to create a piece that is more than just about the event.

Below are a few poems of which emphasize different elements:  imagery, metaphor, sound patterns, and point of view/locus in using their events to create art:

1. First, let's study Jehanne Dubrow's "Chernobyl Year" to see how the a famous nuclear plant explosion is the backdrop for a poem whose heart is really in a family conflict. What do you find intriguing about Dubrow's images?

2. Now, let's experience Josh Clover's "Nevada Glassworks," which explores more than just the US nuclear bomb tests happening in Nevada in post World War II.  What are some of the surprises, even confusions, that you find in Clover's poem?

3. Jane Hirshfield uses the poetic technique of anaphora to create a wedding poem: "A Blessing for Wedding."  What are some of the surprises we see in what Hirshfield observes, and why is the beginning repetition appropriate for the occasion?

4. How does Tony Gloeggler say a lot in what he doesn't say, in his poem "Five Years Later"?

5.  Kenneth Goldsmith crafted his poems out of found material from the day of the bombings.

6. Here is a poem from an Iraqi solider, Hugh Martin, called "Four-letter Word."

7. Frank O'Hara's most famous poem is "The Day Lady Died," and is known cherished by lit crits for the vivid recollection of the speaker's day on the day Billie Holiday died.

Exquisite Introductions

Exquisite Corpse is a poetry form originated by French surrealist poets in the early 1900s.

To get to have some fun in getting to know each other, and to get your brains rolling with delightful lines, we're going to use the exquisite corpse form. 

Try to write with creativity and clarity (whatever that means at this point!), and to respond to the other writer to link your line to the last:

Line 1:  If you could be any character from a literary piece, who would you be and what quality/characteristic/action of that character stands out?

Line 2: Better yet, if you could re-name yourself, what would your new name be and why?

Line 3: What super-power would you have, and what would you do with it? (Be appropriate!)

Line 4: What bothers you about people? Make sure to define the people! Generalize an issue you have with the world.

Line 5: What is your daily savior from the world's chaos? Detail an action/object and how it keeps you alive!

Line 6: Transform yourself into another animal without telling us. Clue us in with your action and description.

Line 7: End on an image of nature: make a strange observation about something happening in nature.