Wow, those two weeks went by quickly! Between returning to my hometown the other weekend for Aussie Mothers Day and getting all of my assignments done, I completely forgot to do my week 8 summary. So, here are the summaries for week 8 AND week 9!
Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Staring Out
Readings: Voice by Glenda Adams, Dialogue 1 and 2 by Kate Grenville, Girl by Jamaica Kincaid, Loose Ends by Bharati Mukherjee, Hills like White Elephants by Ernest Hemmingway, A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor. Workshop pieces.
In week 8, we focused on the importance of dialogue in our writing. To check if your dialogue is good, ask yourself if it is easy to follow who is speaking. Dialogue can be used to capture the voices of the different characters and it's always a good sign when you can follow a conversation between two or more characters without the use of attributions or dialogue tags, because this usually means your characters have strong, distinct voices. Of course, unless you're writing a script, you will want something other than dialogue on the page. Attributions are good to to assure the reader of who is speaking and break up the conversation at intervals so that they don't get bored of listening to your characters talk. The dialogue tags can also be used to describe the tone or way the character is speaking, like 'yell' or 'whisper' or 'stutter'. However, overusing descriptors in dialogue tags can become distracting to the reader. Another way you can both break up dialogue and attribute it to a character is to add action to the conversation. What are you characters doing, seeing, thinking and feeling during the conversation? What could you include in exposition? For example, the dialogue is not always the best place to convey lots and lots of information or to have a philosophical exploration, so when you're writing about such things, consider in each particular instance whether it would work better as a part of the narrative outside of the dialogue. And of course, don't get bogged down trying to imitate real speech; good dialogue sounds natural without looking like it's trying too hard.
Week 9 followed standard workshopping procedures. Nothing to report.
Poetry: Making it Strange
Readings: On the Beach: A Bicentennial Poem by John Forbes, Newtown Pastoral and Kings Cross Pastoral by Gig Ryan, and To Greece Under the Junta by Martin Johnston. Patti Smith was Right by Pam Brown, Things to Say by Ken Bolton, and The Ash Range, Part Ten: Stirling by Laurie Duggan.
Both weeks focused on postmodern Australian poetry and the poets we studied in each week knew each other, were friends; John Forbes, Gig Ryan and Martin Johnston, and Pam Brown, Ken Bolton and Laurie Duggan. In poetry, these poets write about Australia as a historical necessity, and using the 'I' puts them (and us, in class, as we prepare to write our own poems about Australia) in a tense historical position. We have to ask ourselves how we want to represent our country, and due to the nature of poetry, more importantly, we ask ourselves what usually isn't talked about. Writing poetry can be writing about a community; writing about creating a community. We can write about how communities in Australia were formed and function.
Literature for Children and Young Adults
Readings: Digger J. Jones by Richard J. Frankland, and 4 episodes from the first season of Glee which I don't care to recall.
In week 8 we focused on indigenous histories, particular in Australia. The point of many Australian children's texts about our indigenous peoples is for the readers to develop and awareness and appreciation of their stories. However, there are two different ways of storytelling in this particular case: the traditional storytelling used by whichever indigenous group we choose to zoom in on (usually consists of oral storytelling under certain circumstances in Australia), or contemporary literature, which utilises western storytelling techniques in order to make the text easier to relate to for a non-indigenous audience. Contemporary literature usually has a dual target audience; it is written for both an indigenous audience and a non-indigenous audience. When reading texts from minority cultures, the reader needs to be open to the text, be willing to do some research, be conscious of where they're coming from, and not expect to understand everything.
In week 9, I had to put up with four episodes of Glee and my Gleek of a teacher (and a few Gleeky classmates). I was not impressed. How do people like that stuff?! I did most ofmy homework like a good girl and watched three of the four episodes we were meant to watch for class, but I just couldn't bring myself to waste another hour of my life on that awful excuse for a T.V show... and I really didn't want to listen to them rip off an Aerosmith song, which was probably the deciding factor. But in all seriousness, I understand why it was such a good text to be analysing. Painful though it was to endure, it was really interesting to see how although on the outside it embraces minorities and accepts them on the surface, it still treats them like minorities in the long run, when you look properly. The episodes follow the white, able-bodied, heterosexual characters closest of all and although they gave minorities the spotlight, at the end of the episode, they all went back on their shelves; the background singers and dancers while the non-minority kids were centre stage. Just because the show included all of the token minority characters on the surface, does not mean the show embraced equality and some of the representations of certain minority characters were questionable to say the least. For example, in the episode Ballad, token gay boy Kurt is depicted as predatory, plotting to turn Finn off women, and in Dream On (the episode I didn't watch, but we definitely discussed in class), the fact that token disability (paraplegic, for those fortunate souls who haven't been subject to the show) character Artie is singing about his dream to be able to walk again, depicting disability in a negative way... meanwhile, all of his able-bodied Glee-club members dance around him.
Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: 'What're yer lookin' at yer fuckin' dog' by Kevin Brophy, Introduction: portrait of an essay as a warm body by C Ozick, and Water by M Stanton, workshop pieces. The Journalist and the Murderer by J Malcolm, Whose Story is it? by R Robertson, and Lies and Silences by M Wheatley, workshop pieces.
The readings were not really talked about in class as we spent most of our time workshopping for our final assessment pieces. I workshopped in week 9 and was happy with the feedback I received. Many of the students are using their first assignment as a starting point and expanding on it for the final assignment, myself included. This is probably the only class ever where we are allowed to do such a thing.
And that sums up the past two weeks worth of classes for me! Sorry for disappearing from the blogosphere for a bit there, but I guess I've been saying that a lot lately ha ha. As I enter the final two weeks of the trimester leading up to all of my final assessment pieces, I seem to be scarily spread-thin for time. Between parties, assignments, work, Deakin Writers events, Wordly Magazine stuff, and the Emerging Writers' Festival, I have a very busy next three weeks and I am so excited to experience them!
Also! Seeing as the Deakin teaching period ends with the month of May, I have no exams, and I'm hoping to somehow have most of my assignments done ahead of schedule, my grand plan for the break (until 11th July, so over a month) is to print off WALLS and blu-tack the pages to the walls of my room so that I can edit the crap out of it without having to go scrolly-scrolling through the document constantly. I think the visual aspect of having everything right there in front of my like that will help me deal with some consistency issues I'm worried about, including characterisation, character development, back-stories, and (my favourite) worldbuilding. I suppose this is going to be my own little JuNoWriMo project, but with editing instead of writing.
What writerly things have you done in the past two weeks? Anyone else going to the Emerging Writers' Festival in Melbourne? Who else has something writerly planned for June?
- Bonnee.
Showing posts with label Saturday summary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saturday summary. Show all posts
Monday, May 19, 2014
Sunday, May 4, 2014
A Tale of Three Writers/Saturday Summary: Week 7
Greetings, all! It has been decided that my two best writerly friends and I are going to linky link to each other's blogs to tell an interwoven tale of three creative writing university students. So I would like you all to meet Holmes over at Life, the Universe and Everything According to a Writer, and Watson over at Not A Sexy Vampire. Whenever in the past you have heard me talk about my writerly friends, these guys are the people I'm talking about.
Once again, it is closing in on that time where all of my assignments are due in quick succession, but I think I'm ahead of where I need to be, so it isn't so bad. Here is a summary of what I learned in class this week, feel free to skip to your area of interest:
Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
Readings: Workshop pieces.
This week was again spent mostly workshopping, but I wanted to bring up something I saw in one of the pieces a classmate brought in. It was a brilliant piece, so well written in my opinion, and she's paid attention to small details that helped to really establish what the character was like. By this, I mean, she made intertextual references: for example, she named a book, quoted from Pulp Fiction and referred to a character from another text. The way she wove it into her story, although I didn't know much or anything about most of the references she made, still allowed me (and from the sounds of it the majority of the class) to enjoy reading it. It didn't distract me from what I was reading and instead I got this idea of a character who was intellectual and into pop-culture. But our teacher disagreed and said that more detail about these references had to be made, because a reader shouldn't have to go and look something up from outside of the text. Now, if our teacher had stated this as a suggestion rather than a you must then maybe I wouldn't have such a problem with it. I just think this is one example of the exception to the rule, but our teacher couldn't recognise that although the majority of the rest of the class did. Our teacher has this obsession with concrete details and writing about the mundane, and while I understand the importance, the way she stresses that these are RULES makes writing feel more like a science than an art.
Poetry: Making it Strange
Readings: Mina Loy Others and Feminist Manifesto.
The radical's radical was this week's topic in poetry. We spent a bit of time looking at Mina Loy, who wrote some very gritty stuff. In Others she basically breaks the convention of a love poem and turns writing about sex into something ugly and honest. I don't think the guy she was writing about would have been particularly flattered by some of her representations of him. I really enjoyed that reading, ha ha. Our teacher asked us to consider what part hatred plays in writing poetry. Two things that seem to be a large part of human nature (and should therefore be a part of poetry) are eros (erotic or romantic love) and thanatos (the death drive and the will to destruction). This led into a discussion about writing a manifesto, which, the understanding I got, is when you basically write a big rant about things you think are wrong with the world. Mina Loy wrote one about gender inequality. I'd probably write one about homophobia or racism or something like that.
Literature for Children and Young Adults
Readings: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and Why Race, Class, and Gender Still Matter by Margaret Anderson and Patricia Collins.
This week we were focusing on identity, intersectionality, and the ethics of interpretation. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is Sherman Alexie's fictionalised autobiography, which I absolutely loved, controversy and all. This book was used to analyse how race, class, and gender are represented in books and how they intersect both in text and in real life. We also looked a step further, to see how sexuality, ability/disability, and religion are represented and intersect with each other to represent life in books. Basically, we were looking to see whether or not the book broke the characters down into labels and focused on one aspect, or if they too all of the aspects of a character into consideration whilst writing to show the way they work together to create an individual. For example, the main character, Arnold, is a Spokane Indian, but he is also poor, but he is male, but he is straight, but he was born with too much cerebral spinal fluid inside his skull so now he has a stutter and a lisp, but he's still athletic and intelligent. So we were looking at how these different aspects of him were represented and how they came together to create one person. I'm going to review this book later in the week.
Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: The Boys of Beallsville by J Pilger, The Long Fall Into Steel by B Walker, and Consider the Lobster by DF Wallace.
This week we were talking about issues and stories and it it is important to find the shape of our story. Some people just want to write about relationships, or they just want to write about death, but they can't do that effectively unless they take an angle on the issue and make a story of it. You can write about relationships, or death, or poverty, or war, or happiness, but it needs to be within a context and a story. Something interesting that sometimes happens is that the structure of a story reflect or becomes meaning, and the form becomes content. I've noticed I do this subconsciously, and then someone points it out and I'll be like "Oh, yes, that was totally intentional" *shifty eyes*.
And that sums up what I learned this week. I hope something in there was useful to whoever is reading, and please check out my mates' blogs, because they're both very cool and unique people and writers.
Did you learn anything writerly this week?
- Bonnee.
Once again, it is closing in on that time where all of my assignments are due in quick succession, but I think I'm ahead of where I need to be, so it isn't so bad. Here is a summary of what I learned in class this week, feel free to skip to your area of interest:
Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
Readings: Workshop pieces.
This week was again spent mostly workshopping, but I wanted to bring up something I saw in one of the pieces a classmate brought in. It was a brilliant piece, so well written in my opinion, and she's paid attention to small details that helped to really establish what the character was like. By this, I mean, she made intertextual references: for example, she named a book, quoted from Pulp Fiction and referred to a character from another text. The way she wove it into her story, although I didn't know much or anything about most of the references she made, still allowed me (and from the sounds of it the majority of the class) to enjoy reading it. It didn't distract me from what I was reading and instead I got this idea of a character who was intellectual and into pop-culture. But our teacher disagreed and said that more detail about these references had to be made, because a reader shouldn't have to go and look something up from outside of the text. Now, if our teacher had stated this as a suggestion rather than a you must then maybe I wouldn't have such a problem with it. I just think this is one example of the exception to the rule, but our teacher couldn't recognise that although the majority of the rest of the class did. Our teacher has this obsession with concrete details and writing about the mundane, and while I understand the importance, the way she stresses that these are RULES makes writing feel more like a science than an art.
Poetry: Making it Strange
Readings: Mina Loy Others and Feminist Manifesto.
The radical's radical was this week's topic in poetry. We spent a bit of time looking at Mina Loy, who wrote some very gritty stuff. In Others she basically breaks the convention of a love poem and turns writing about sex into something ugly and honest. I don't think the guy she was writing about would have been particularly flattered by some of her representations of him. I really enjoyed that reading, ha ha. Our teacher asked us to consider what part hatred plays in writing poetry. Two things that seem to be a large part of human nature (and should therefore be a part of poetry) are eros (erotic or romantic love) and thanatos (the death drive and the will to destruction). This led into a discussion about writing a manifesto, which, the understanding I got, is when you basically write a big rant about things you think are wrong with the world. Mina Loy wrote one about gender inequality. I'd probably write one about homophobia or racism or something like that.
Literature for Children and Young Adults
Readings: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and Why Race, Class, and Gender Still Matter by Margaret Anderson and Patricia Collins.
This week we were focusing on identity, intersectionality, and the ethics of interpretation. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is Sherman Alexie's fictionalised autobiography, which I absolutely loved, controversy and all. This book was used to analyse how race, class, and gender are represented in books and how they intersect both in text and in real life. We also looked a step further, to see how sexuality, ability/disability, and religion are represented and intersect with each other to represent life in books. Basically, we were looking to see whether or not the book broke the characters down into labels and focused on one aspect, or if they too all of the aspects of a character into consideration whilst writing to show the way they work together to create an individual. For example, the main character, Arnold, is a Spokane Indian, but he is also poor, but he is male, but he is straight, but he was born with too much cerebral spinal fluid inside his skull so now he has a stutter and a lisp, but he's still athletic and intelligent. So we were looking at how these different aspects of him were represented and how they came together to create one person. I'm going to review this book later in the week.
Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: The Boys of Beallsville by J Pilger, The Long Fall Into Steel by B Walker, and Consider the Lobster by DF Wallace.
This week we were talking about issues and stories and it it is important to find the shape of our story. Some people just want to write about relationships, or they just want to write about death, but they can't do that effectively unless they take an angle on the issue and make a story of it. You can write about relationships, or death, or poverty, or war, or happiness, but it needs to be within a context and a story. Something interesting that sometimes happens is that the structure of a story reflect or becomes meaning, and the form becomes content. I've noticed I do this subconsciously, and then someone points it out and I'll be like "Oh, yes, that was totally intentional" *shifty eyes*.
And that sums up what I learned this week. I hope something in there was useful to whoever is reading, and please check out my mates' blogs, because they're both very cool and unique people and writers.
Did you learn anything writerly this week?
- Bonnee.
Saturday, April 26, 2014
Saturday Summary: Week 6
I went missing-in-action for a couple of weeks there, so sorry! The past week has consisted of the mid-semester break and after missing the chance to upload this last Saturday, I figured I may as well just wait until this Saturday. Meanwhile, I have been indulging in chocolate, swimming with a bunch of writerly friends, working at the library, and having the unit on res to myself as all of my housemates stayed in their hometowns for longer than I did. Here is the summary of my classes from two weeks ago!
Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
Readings: Workshop pieces.
This week was the week I workshopped alongside two of my best writerly friends. I was really pleased with the responses I got this week, everyone's pieces were really good and I thought the feedback was useful and very encouraging. This is why I love workshopping in class. I didn't bring in a full first-draft because I wanted to get an idea of whether or not the class thought the subject and the writing was 'literary' (as is required for this assignment) and to get an idea of where a first-time reader would think the story is going if they had to guess. I can't wait to keep writing this piece.
Poetry: Making it Strange
Readings: Ode to a Grecian Urn by John Keats, Ode on Melancholy by John Keats, and Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The reason our teacher wanted us to read these poems was so that he could tell us not to try and write poems like them. Keats and Shelly were the 17th Century romantics, but for our assignment especially our teacher wants us to write about the world as we have inherited it.
We took a look at some other poems in class to get a better idea of what our teacher meant by this. It was the small decisions within these poems that made them stand out; the unique use of words, the choice to refer to certain things that probably weren't around in the 17th Century. Good poetry is made up of small decisions.
Literature for Children and Young Adults
Readings: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
This week we were looking at graphic novels and memoir. The reading, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi, is both. We started the lecture by looking at Australia's engagement with Asia, how texts represent Asia, and how they represent Australia. The Australian engagement with Asia is surprisingly manipulated and limited to particular aspects. In Persepolis, the setting is Tehran, Iran, in the late 70s and early 80s. We are told about political, religious, and cultural aspects of the time and place through the eyes of a young girl, between the ages of 10 and 14. Some time next week, I am aiming to write a review for this book, because I really enjoyed it.
The graphic novel is a long-form comic. It uses juxtaposed pictures and images in a deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and produce an aesthetic response in viewers. Although they rely heavily on illustrations to tell the story, they are very different to picture books, for example: in the way they depict movement and the number of different pictures that are often on the same page. The images of a graphic novel are laid out in panels and strips rather than in spreads, the gutter is the space between panels rather tan the fold in the middle of the book, and closure* is what a reader fills in between panels rather tan what they fill in when they turn the page. (*in this case, closure is not referring to the 'narrative closure' at the end of the story where all lose ends are tied up.)
Persepolis was used as an example of how texts represent childhood and adolescence as developmental stages, that identities are formed in particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, and that identities are formed in particular historical and colonial contexts. This book can be used to compare the representation of class and gender in a particular time and setting.
Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: Home Truths: Revisiting Wake in Fright by K Jennings and Hope Lives Here by G Linnell.
This week discussed the use of multiple voices and characters in a creative nonfiction personal essay and some methods of keeping them accurate, specifically the writer's responsibility to do their research and conduct interviews where appropriate. Writers need to research beyond their own means to write competent and true stories. Interviews, especially when conducted face-to-face, are useful for gaining information, observing behaviour, ascertaining opinions, facts, and observations about an individual, and to better understand the story. One of the great things about interviewing somebody is that although you might start with certain questions in mind, if you let them just talk and talk and allow them to go on a tangent while answering the questions you're asking, they might end up giving you information you never considering, stories you weren't expecting, and more material to work with than you could have hoped for. Of course, for this to happen, the interviewee needs to be comfortable enough in the interview setting to open up, which is why it is important to have good people skills and conduct the interview in a place and form that the interviewee is most comfortable with. The interviewer needs to be aware that it isn't an interrogation, but a dialogue, a conversation. After an interview, you might go back to the questions and answers and decide that some of the things you would like to include in your story are not entirely clear, and it is then the writer's job to verify the information and seek clarification, especially if the piece is intended for publishing.
However, just as we have to choose certain aspects of ourselves when we write the 'I' in a creative nonfiction piece, we also have to choose certain aspects of the story, otherwise it could become too confusing, too long, too complicated. The things we choose to include and exclude need to make the reader feel (or not feel) the way the writer is trying to make them feel (or not feel) and so that the intended message being conveyed isn't overshadowed or diminished by other things. However, this also has to be done with respect for the other people involved and their wishes.
That concludes the week 6 Saturday Summary. I apologise again for going missing in action for a couple of weeks there, I'll try to resurface and visit everyone's blogs again soon! Happy writing, everyone.
Did you enjoy your Easter/International Chocolate Indulgence Day?
- Bonnee.
Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
Readings: Workshop pieces.
This week was the week I workshopped alongside two of my best writerly friends. I was really pleased with the responses I got this week, everyone's pieces were really good and I thought the feedback was useful and very encouraging. This is why I love workshopping in class. I didn't bring in a full first-draft because I wanted to get an idea of whether or not the class thought the subject and the writing was 'literary' (as is required for this assignment) and to get an idea of where a first-time reader would think the story is going if they had to guess. I can't wait to keep writing this piece.
Poetry: Making it Strange
Readings: Ode to a Grecian Urn by John Keats, Ode on Melancholy by John Keats, and Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The reason our teacher wanted us to read these poems was so that he could tell us not to try and write poems like them. Keats and Shelly were the 17th Century romantics, but for our assignment especially our teacher wants us to write about the world as we have inherited it.
We took a look at some other poems in class to get a better idea of what our teacher meant by this. It was the small decisions within these poems that made them stand out; the unique use of words, the choice to refer to certain things that probably weren't around in the 17th Century. Good poetry is made up of small decisions.
Literature for Children and Young Adults
Readings: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
This week we were looking at graphic novels and memoir. The reading, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi, is both. We started the lecture by looking at Australia's engagement with Asia, how texts represent Asia, and how they represent Australia. The Australian engagement with Asia is surprisingly manipulated and limited to particular aspects. In Persepolis, the setting is Tehran, Iran, in the late 70s and early 80s. We are told about political, religious, and cultural aspects of the time and place through the eyes of a young girl, between the ages of 10 and 14. Some time next week, I am aiming to write a review for this book, because I really enjoyed it.
The graphic novel is a long-form comic. It uses juxtaposed pictures and images in a deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and produce an aesthetic response in viewers. Although they rely heavily on illustrations to tell the story, they are very different to picture books, for example: in the way they depict movement and the number of different pictures that are often on the same page. The images of a graphic novel are laid out in panels and strips rather than in spreads, the gutter is the space between panels rather tan the fold in the middle of the book, and closure* is what a reader fills in between panels rather tan what they fill in when they turn the page. (*in this case, closure is not referring to the 'narrative closure' at the end of the story where all lose ends are tied up.)
Persepolis was used as an example of how texts represent childhood and adolescence as developmental stages, that identities are formed in particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, and that identities are formed in particular historical and colonial contexts. This book can be used to compare the representation of class and gender in a particular time and setting.
Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: Home Truths: Revisiting Wake in Fright by K Jennings and Hope Lives Here by G Linnell.
This week discussed the use of multiple voices and characters in a creative nonfiction personal essay and some methods of keeping them accurate, specifically the writer's responsibility to do their research and conduct interviews where appropriate. Writers need to research beyond their own means to write competent and true stories. Interviews, especially when conducted face-to-face, are useful for gaining information, observing behaviour, ascertaining opinions, facts, and observations about an individual, and to better understand the story. One of the great things about interviewing somebody is that although you might start with certain questions in mind, if you let them just talk and talk and allow them to go on a tangent while answering the questions you're asking, they might end up giving you information you never considering, stories you weren't expecting, and more material to work with than you could have hoped for. Of course, for this to happen, the interviewee needs to be comfortable enough in the interview setting to open up, which is why it is important to have good people skills and conduct the interview in a place and form that the interviewee is most comfortable with. The interviewer needs to be aware that it isn't an interrogation, but a dialogue, a conversation. After an interview, you might go back to the questions and answers and decide that some of the things you would like to include in your story are not entirely clear, and it is then the writer's job to verify the information and seek clarification, especially if the piece is intended for publishing.
However, just as we have to choose certain aspects of ourselves when we write the 'I' in a creative nonfiction piece, we also have to choose certain aspects of the story, otherwise it could become too confusing, too long, too complicated. The things we choose to include and exclude need to make the reader feel (or not feel) the way the writer is trying to make them feel (or not feel) and so that the intended message being conveyed isn't overshadowed or diminished by other things. However, this also has to be done with respect for the other people involved and their wishes.
That concludes the week 6 Saturday Summary. I apologise again for going missing in action for a couple of weeks there, I'll try to resurface and visit everyone's blogs again soon! Happy writing, everyone.
Did you enjoy your Easter/International Chocolate Indulgence Day?
- Bonnee.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Saturday Summary: Week 5
It's that week before assignment due-dates arrive, submissions for the next edition of Wordly have just closed, and I almost feel like I went out of my way to over-commit to this weekend and next week. But here is a summary of the classes I've had this week.
Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
Readings: Workshop pieces.
This week, and I'm expecting the following weeks to be much the same, was spent workshopping our classmates work for our assignment. For lack of anything else to report about, I'll tell you about the assignment. We have a fiction piece due at the end of the trimester, worth 50% of our overall mark for the class. The piece(s) has to be 2500 words, which is a nice number for word counts if you ask me. Last year, my creative assignments all fell around the 1500 word mark, and I know I was not alone in thinking we were expected to fit too much into those 1500 words. Now with an extra 1000 words to work with, I'm thinking the classes will see some final pieces that are much more filled-out and well-rounded than in last year's classes. I'm scheduled to workshop my own piece this coming Monday, so wish me luck!
Poetry: Making It Strange
Reading: My Last Duchess by Robert Browning.
This week we were looking at persona, irony, and satire in poetry. The poem set for the reading, My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, was a great example of these things. What's great about poetry as with any writing is that you can speak as anyone or anything. Of course, poetry allows for a little more unquestioned experimentation than other forms of writing normally do. The possibility of who you could speak as in the poem is limitless. An interesting note that came up in class discussion was that it's easy to write characters we don't like, because of the emotions they trigger within us. The irony of this is that a lot of people write poetry in an attempt to capture and immortalise something beautiful and living, something that's always disappearing.
Something else that can be included in poetry is pathos: a quality that evokes pity or sadness. I first learned this word when I was studying Drama in high school, as it was a technique we tried to use in our performances too. But pathos isn't something you can just insert when you write. You have to make it believable and real, give it life and ignite it so that it is actually felt rather than just represented.
Another relationship poetry has with other forms of literature is the ability to start in medias res or in the midst of the action, rather than always starting at the beginning.
Literature for Children and Young Adults
Reading: The Little Refugee by Anh Do and Suzanne Do.
This week we discussed the use of schemas and scripts in children's books. Schemas are knowledge structures, patterns and associations that we store in our memories. They are often culturally specific. For example, using the text we studied this week, the picture book The Little Refugee, we have the schemas of Vietnam, Australia, boat people, refugees, and multiculturalism, just to name a few. What do you think of when you hear any one of those words? Put simply, that's what a schema is.
Scripts in children's books are much easier to identify. This is the expected sequence of actions and events based on previous exposures to the script. For example, there is the conventional guy meets girl, falls in love, can't have the girl for whatever reason, commits some heroic act, gets the girl, and they all live happily ever after. For an Australian audience, a refugee script would usually follow the path of an illegal immigration by boat. A less conventional script in the stories we read would be when the characters legally* seek asylum. (*I have some very strong views on asylum seekers, refugees, boat people, and whatever other labels you want to stick on those poor souls, and the way the Australian government treats them, but I'm not here to argue about them. I'll wait and fire my shots in my writing.)
Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: The Art of Personal Narrative by V Gornick, Who Stole the Soul of the Boy from Indiana? by P Conrad, and In the Giant Green Cathedral: Malcolm Knox on Tim Winton's Breath and surf writing by M Knox.
This week's topic was narrative experiment. This is when the story is not presented as a conventional piece of prose. We ask ourselves how we can complicate and enliven our work and remember that our work does not have to conform to a particular formula. The only thing our work does need is a strong and appropriate narrator. We have to identify what the situation is, what is important about that situation, and what aspects of ourselves will animate the piece by being put into the 'I' character.
I apologise if these notes weren't as thorough as they have been in previous weeks. I don't know if it's just me and my suddenly busier-than-usual schedule messing with my head, or if there was just a lot more practical work and less theory and notes taken this week than in previous weeks.
Did you learn anything writerly you would like to share this week?
- Bonnee.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Saturday Summary: Week 3
At this point at the end of week 3, I'm thinking it might be a good time to start working on my assignments, so that I don't have to do them all at once the night before they're due. My first one is due on 14th April and I already have an idea of what I want to do. Here's what was covered in my classes this week:
Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
Readings: Searching for the Secret River by K Grenville, Writing Short Stories by F O'Connor, The Writing Experiment by H Smith, Explorations in Creative Writing by K Brophy, How Fiction Works by J Wood, An Ocurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by A Bierce, The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow by G Garcia Marquez, and Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice by N Le.
Admittedly, I had a busy weekend and didn't quite get a chance to read any of these (except that I'd read the last one a few years ago, which I loved). We discussed the circumstances we need in order to do our best writing, and how the requirements might change depending on what we are writing. For example, I hate working in silence, but I seem to generally work best when there is instrumental music in the background without lyrics. When I'm trying to concentrate, I'll put on a playlist of Yiruma or the musical scores of movies. Han Zimmer is a favourite on my Spotify account. However, waiting for ideal circumstance for writing is not going to help you make progress. Sometimes, you just have to get those ideas down as they come to you, even when you're in the middle of something. Just jot them down somewhere - in your smartphone, on a serviette, along your wrist, up your leg - because if you don't, there's such a chance of forgetting by the time the ideal circumstances come around. And that's part of the beauty of first drafts. You can get away with it being rough and imperfect. Starting out tends to be the hardest part, but once you've got something down on the page, you can work with it from there. Do not wait for time to write. Find time. Make time. Write.
We talked a lot about short stories in class this week and noted that one of the rookie mistakes short story writers make is that they exclude details completely and think they're simply being subtle, but really, a little bit of what you're trying to imply needs to be in there in order for you to be subtle, otherwise how else is the reader to know it's supposed to be there? Short stories are about writing dramatic actions and emotions and too often, the author is hung up on wanting to write about problems, not people, and about abstract concepts rather than anything concrete, or they are caught up in the idea of being a writer, that they forget they actually need to be telling a story. So remember to keep the story in mind when you're writing, otherwise you're just rambling.
Poetry: Making it Strange
Readings: A Ballad - After Villon by Tom Scott, Testimony, Theory, Testament: On Translating Francois Villon by Justin Clemens, Ballad of the Dead Ladies by Francois Villon, translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Our question when we did the roll-call was: If you were a criminal, what would you cal yourself and what would be your specialty?
We talked about Francois de Mentcorbier and Georges Villon, and ended up discussing a lot about medieval France. This is where the creation of la petite testament, la grande testament, and the ballad occurred. Our teacher also taught us the phrase memento mori: Remember that you will die.
We read through the readings in class and talked about them and we noted that every culture seems to need demons, and every culture recreates them in one way or another. It's almost like they're trying to breed fear.
Literature for Children and Young Adults
Readings: Jack and the Beanstalk by Joseph Jacobs, Jack and the Beanstalks by Edwin Hartland, and Jack and the Beanstalk by Andrew Lang.
This week focused on narrative theory and ideology and we applied what we learned to the three different version of Jack and the Beanstalk we read. This is something I feel my classes have covered a hundred times over, but I still found it useful. Reader positioning is the way the text influences the reader to adopt particular views of the characters and actions in the story. Then we talked about who the story is told to and who is listening: The real reader vs the implied reader/target audience vs who the narrator appears to be talking to within the story/the narratee. Then we discussed the question, who speaks? We talked about the real author vs the implied author (inferred by the reader from the text) vs the narrator.
This led to a discussion about the different types of narrators. First person, as a participant or as an observer; third person, omniscient vs limited. We talked about intrusive/overt and un-intrusive/covert narrators, who either have a presence or character in the story, at least to a degree, or are identified as no more than a voice telling the story. We also discussed how to distinguish between having a reliable or an unreliable narrator: are they naive, ignorant, bias, or of dubious moral character? Can they be trusted, and how much can they be trusted? We talked about focalisation, often called point of view, which is the lens through which we see the story.
Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character by P Lopate, Sophie by JM Coetzee, A Farewell to Beirut by R Fisk, and Mother Tongue by A Tan.
It's always interesting to see how the subjects covered in classes match up each week. We talked about narrative point of view in this class. In a personal essay, the 'I' must form a character as well as a narrator. This is done by selecting the aspects of yourself relevant to the story being told and applying them to the 'I' character. This includes the way we speak. Have you ever noticed that you change the way you speak according to who is around you? According to Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, we speak in genres. When writing a personal essay, we need to pick which genre our 'I' character should speak in, otherwise consistency is lost. In writing ourselves as an 'I' character, we also have to be mindful of showing our own character development, which means admitting to our own personal flaws and imperfections and putting them into words.
What did you learn about writing this week?
- Bonnee.
Friday, March 21, 2014
Saturday Summary: Week 2
Yes, I know it's actually Friday (or if you're not in the same timezone as Australia, it's probably even still Thursday!) but I'm not going to have a chance to write this up on Saturday, so I'm sending it in early. I've just had a great second week of uni and I can't believe how quickly time is flying by. Here are the things I want to share with you from my classes this week:
Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
Readings: 'It's Genre. Not that there's anything wrong with it!!' by A Krystal, 'The Circular Ruins' by JL Borges, 'The Second Bakery Attack' by Haruki Murakami, 'Lifelike and Josephine' by P Haines, and 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: A Memoir Based on a True Story' by D Eggers.
This week was focused on the genre fiction vs literary fiction debate, which I personally thing is a silly thing to argue about. Both styles have their pros and cons and if they are executed right, are capable of being just as good as each other. The article we read by A Krystal was offensive to many of the genre-writers in the room and most if not all of us disagreed with what was being said. However, the aim of our class is to create something that falls under the heading of literary fiction. That's not to say we cannot write in a genre if we are writing literary fiction. It just means we have to write something that isn't commercial fiction, as commercial fiction seems to be the more general way of referring to all of the genre categories. The other readings were used as examples of literary fiction and helped us to define the term. A lot of people in the class were only hearing of literary fiction for the first time.
The difference between genre/commercial fiction and literary fiction seems to be that, generally speaking, commercial fiction follows a familiar story-line and the reader knows what to expect from the book, the language and style is simple and straightforward and readers consider it fun, whereas literary fiction supposedly carries deeper and more complex messages, doesn't follow cliche story-lines or use the expected tropes, and the reader starts the book without really knowing what to expect, but the content resonates with real life. Personally, I think this is all bogus. There is genre fiction that has fancy language and complex issues and which resonates with us afterwards, and there is literary fiction that falls flat of that expectation of sweeping us off our feet. But I will share with you a quote from the article by Krystal: "One brings us fun or frightening gifts, the other requires - and repays - observance." What do you think of this?
Poetry: Making it Strange
Readings: 'Vidal in Furs: Lyric Poetry, Narrative, and Masoch(ism)' by Simon Pender, 'After Peire, Vidal, & Myself' by Ted Berrigan, and 'From Dawn to Dawn: Troubadour Poetry' translated by A.S. Kline.
This week's roll-call question was 'What is the worst threat you ever got', to which I did not have a particularly impressive answer ("I'll tell your mother!" back in primary school?). Anyway, this week's class was about the Troubadours who were popular back in the 11th-12th Centuries in southern France and parts of Spain and Italy. They are supposedly the inventors of love in Western songs. They created the love song (Canso), songs that comment on public things and gossip (Sir Ventes), and songs that were arguments between two Troubadours (Tenso). It was considered an aristocratic pursuit at the time. These people would write songs and poems and learn how to play instruments and then go around to royal courts to perform. The male Troubadours would usually pick a woman from the audience (usually the hostess) and sing as if he was singing to her. The point is that they were seducing someone publicly with their words and their instruments. The Troubadours were replaced by their impersonators the Jongleves, who created the Vido (a short bio of the original creator of the song) and the Razo (an account of the song's composition).
Later in the class, we talked about people who make themselves out of fictions or develop their own madness, Quixotic (kee-oh-tee). And we talked about how when we are writing, we have to remember where we come from (though we don't necessarily have to write about ourselves).
Literature for Children and Young Adults
Readings: 'Little Red Riding Hood' by Charles Perrault, 'Little Red Cap' by the Brothers Grimm, and 'Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf' by Roald Dahl.
If you didn't guess by the reading list, this week we were studying fairy tales, specifically Little Red Riding Hood. The thing about fairy tales is that they were not originally told for children, and what we know as 'fairy tales' today are merely adaptions of stories that were first made for adults. The point of us looking at all three different versions of Little Red Riding Hood listed above was to see how children, specifically little girls, were portrayed over the different periods of time when each of these stories were written.
Before we nosedived into the analysis of these three LRRH stories, we took a look at the conventions of a fairy tale. Settings: forest, castle, cottage, village, etc. Characters: peasants and royalty, magical/mythical folk, talking animals, etc. Iconography: glass slipper, spinning wheel, red apple, red hooded cloak, etc. Narrative elements: minimal detail, flat characters, repetitions (in 3s), happy endings (in the children adaptions) etc. Then of course we have the element of story: a full sequence of events in 'natural' order and duration, and plot: a pattern of events/situations arranged to emphasise (cause and effect) relationships and to evoke certain emotions. We took a look at these conventions in relation to LRRH. The setting inside the forest on her way to grandma's house is a metaphor for danger and we can easily place Red, Grandma, the Big Bad Wolf, and the Huntsman into the six character roles: Giver/receiver, subject/object, and helper/opponent. In fairy tales, there is binary opposition, where everything is set in pairs of opposite and there is no overlapping between good and evil. We also talked about sexism and gender roles in texts like fairy tale; how the women always need saving by men (Little Red and Grandma), and there are two types of men, the ones who save you (the Huntsman) and the ones you need saving from (the Big Bad Wolf). Little Red becomes less helpless (and more violent) in the more recently written versions of the story.
Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: 'Putting Yourself on the Line: Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Essay' by P Gerard, 'The Art of the Dumb Question' by H Garner, 'Introduction' by I Glass, and 'Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self' by A Walker.
This week was focused on writing about the self. The point of personal essays and memoirs and autobiographies is that we are trying to make what interests us resonate with others. In the words of Philip Gerard, "The best personal essays are usually about the self in relation to a world beyond the self."
When we analysed the readings above, we did so with Huxley's three poles in mind. Huxley's three poles are three different ways of writing: personal and autobiographical; objective, factual, concrete-particular; and abstract-universal. Our goal when we are writing, especially a creative nonfiction personal essay, is to make the transitions between these three types of writing seamless so that it doesn't distract the reader.
That concludes classes for this week. What are your thoughts on the genre vs literary fiction debate? Which class are you most interested in? Have you got any lessons of your own to share?
- Bonnee.
Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
Readings: 'It's Genre. Not that there's anything wrong with it!!' by A Krystal, 'The Circular Ruins' by JL Borges, 'The Second Bakery Attack' by Haruki Murakami, 'Lifelike and Josephine' by P Haines, and 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: A Memoir Based on a True Story' by D Eggers.
This week was focused on the genre fiction vs literary fiction debate, which I personally thing is a silly thing to argue about. Both styles have their pros and cons and if they are executed right, are capable of being just as good as each other. The article we read by A Krystal was offensive to many of the genre-writers in the room and most if not all of us disagreed with what was being said. However, the aim of our class is to create something that falls under the heading of literary fiction. That's not to say we cannot write in a genre if we are writing literary fiction. It just means we have to write something that isn't commercial fiction, as commercial fiction seems to be the more general way of referring to all of the genre categories. The other readings were used as examples of literary fiction and helped us to define the term. A lot of people in the class were only hearing of literary fiction for the first time.
The difference between genre/commercial fiction and literary fiction seems to be that, generally speaking, commercial fiction follows a familiar story-line and the reader knows what to expect from the book, the language and style is simple and straightforward and readers consider it fun, whereas literary fiction supposedly carries deeper and more complex messages, doesn't follow cliche story-lines or use the expected tropes, and the reader starts the book without really knowing what to expect, but the content resonates with real life. Personally, I think this is all bogus. There is genre fiction that has fancy language and complex issues and which resonates with us afterwards, and there is literary fiction that falls flat of that expectation of sweeping us off our feet. But I will share with you a quote from the article by Krystal: "One brings us fun or frightening gifts, the other requires - and repays - observance." What do you think of this?
Poetry: Making it Strange
Readings: 'Vidal in Furs: Lyric Poetry, Narrative, and Masoch(ism)' by Simon Pender, 'After Peire, Vidal, & Myself' by Ted Berrigan, and 'From Dawn to Dawn: Troubadour Poetry' translated by A.S. Kline.
This week's roll-call question was 'What is the worst threat you ever got', to which I did not have a particularly impressive answer ("I'll tell your mother!" back in primary school?). Anyway, this week's class was about the Troubadours who were popular back in the 11th-12th Centuries in southern France and parts of Spain and Italy. They are supposedly the inventors of love in Western songs. They created the love song (Canso), songs that comment on public things and gossip (Sir Ventes), and songs that were arguments between two Troubadours (Tenso). It was considered an aristocratic pursuit at the time. These people would write songs and poems and learn how to play instruments and then go around to royal courts to perform. The male Troubadours would usually pick a woman from the audience (usually the hostess) and sing as if he was singing to her. The point is that they were seducing someone publicly with their words and their instruments. The Troubadours were replaced by their impersonators the Jongleves, who created the Vido (a short bio of the original creator of the song) and the Razo (an account of the song's composition).
Later in the class, we talked about people who make themselves out of fictions or develop their own madness, Quixotic (kee-oh-tee). And we talked about how when we are writing, we have to remember where we come from (though we don't necessarily have to write about ourselves).
Literature for Children and Young Adults
Readings: 'Little Red Riding Hood' by Charles Perrault, 'Little Red Cap' by the Brothers Grimm, and 'Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf' by Roald Dahl.
If you didn't guess by the reading list, this week we were studying fairy tales, specifically Little Red Riding Hood. The thing about fairy tales is that they were not originally told for children, and what we know as 'fairy tales' today are merely adaptions of stories that were first made for adults. The point of us looking at all three different versions of Little Red Riding Hood listed above was to see how children, specifically little girls, were portrayed over the different periods of time when each of these stories were written.
Before we nosedived into the analysis of these three LRRH stories, we took a look at the conventions of a fairy tale. Settings: forest, castle, cottage, village, etc. Characters: peasants and royalty, magical/mythical folk, talking animals, etc. Iconography: glass slipper, spinning wheel, red apple, red hooded cloak, etc. Narrative elements: minimal detail, flat characters, repetitions (in 3s), happy endings (in the children adaptions) etc. Then of course we have the element of story: a full sequence of events in 'natural' order and duration, and plot: a pattern of events/situations arranged to emphasise (cause and effect) relationships and to evoke certain emotions. We took a look at these conventions in relation to LRRH. The setting inside the forest on her way to grandma's house is a metaphor for danger and we can easily place Red, Grandma, the Big Bad Wolf, and the Huntsman into the six character roles: Giver/receiver, subject/object, and helper/opponent. In fairy tales, there is binary opposition, where everything is set in pairs of opposite and there is no overlapping between good and evil. We also talked about sexism and gender roles in texts like fairy tale; how the women always need saving by men (Little Red and Grandma), and there are two types of men, the ones who save you (the Huntsman) and the ones you need saving from (the Big Bad Wolf). Little Red becomes less helpless (and more violent) in the more recently written versions of the story.
Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Readings: 'Putting Yourself on the Line: Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Essay' by P Gerard, 'The Art of the Dumb Question' by H Garner, 'Introduction' by I Glass, and 'Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self' by A Walker.
This week was focused on writing about the self. The point of personal essays and memoirs and autobiographies is that we are trying to make what interests us resonate with others. In the words of Philip Gerard, "The best personal essays are usually about the self in relation to a world beyond the self."
When we analysed the readings above, we did so with Huxley's three poles in mind. Huxley's three poles are three different ways of writing: personal and autobiographical; objective, factual, concrete-particular; and abstract-universal. Our goal when we are writing, especially a creative nonfiction personal essay, is to make the transitions between these three types of writing seamless so that it doesn't distract the reader.
That concludes classes for this week. What are your thoughts on the genre vs literary fiction debate? Which class are you most interested in? Have you got any lessons of your own to share?
- Bonnee.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Saturday Summary: Week 1
So considering that I want to tell you guys about all four of the classes I'm studying at university this trimester, I've decided I may as well just do it all in one blog post every week. So this will be the first Saturday Summary of all the classes I had this week. Feel free to scroll down to the headings you are interested in and skip the rest.
Of course, as it was the first week of classes, there was a lot of generic introductory stuff, which means future posts will probably be longer than this (and I may end up reconsidering doing this all in one post...).
Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
This is the class that kick-starts the week for me! Our readings were 'Learning Writing Through Reading' by Nigel Krauth and 'The Sentence in Time' by Kevin Brophy.
In the Krauth reading, we looked at the process of reverse engineering, and specifically how it happens in writing. This is when someone pulls apart a story to see how it was made. This is often done with the intention of recreating the story being told. This process sometimes happens subconsciously. More consciously is when it is done because we're thinking about what doesn't work in a story, and what sticks out like a sore thumb. Reverse engineering to find out how something does work often happens subconsciously because unless we are intentionally thinking about how something works, we aren't going to sit there pondering. When it works, it won't distract us from what we're reading, so we don't consciously notice it unless we are looking for it. How many of us writers have read a 'how-to' book? This is reverse engineering from the perspective of another writer. While knowing how to reverse engineer is useful, we have to be careful not to emulate somebody else's work, otherwise we will never write with our own voices. Instead, we should be using this process to find out why we respond to things the way we do.
In the Brophy reading, we examined the creation, use, and purpose of sentences. Sentences in fiction are not all about grammar and punctuation, but about having an experience. As writers, we should be using all of our senses when we form a sentences. Words on their own might mean something, but when we string them together into sentences, we expand their meanings into stories.
Poetry: Making it Strange
This week, we looked into the myth of the myth-maker, Orpheus, the first Greek poet, among other things. We looked at the translation of a poem 'Orpheus and Eurydice' by the Roman poet Virgil, the more modern interpretation of the story called 'Raw Shock' by Toby Fitch, and 'The Sonnets of Orpheus XIII' by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Just a heads up: my teacher for this class, from what I gathered this week, is an absolute basket-case. In other words, I love him, but it's harder to make a coherent, smooth-flowing blog post out of the notes I took. We started the class by answering the questions 'What king of a stain are you?' when he did the roll-call. Then we went on to some Greek words, like poiesis: to make. The prejudice of poets is that the whole world is made through poiesis. The point of writing poetry is to push yourself into thinking: what's the most I can know?
Orpheus was a semi-divine being according to Greek mythology. This led us on to a discussion about why the gods don't write poems. They are not facing death. But then, what is scarier? Knowing you will die, or knowing that you will live forever? As soon as we start writing poems, we become Orpheus. Poets are fetish-ers of words and in the 21st century, there is nothing that can't be put into a poem. I've heard a lot of people saying that all love stories come from Romeo and Juliet, but if you look further back, my class now sees that they all come from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, even if the author isn't aware of it or doesn't choose to name them as such.
The only way to write poetry is to read poetry. When we try, we aim to write an emotion as that emotion, rather than just as a representation of that emotion, so that it plunges the reader into the experience.
Literature for Children and Young Adults
Our reading for this week was 'Why Assumptions Can't be the Whole Truth' by Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer.
Children's literature is one of the few categories specifically defined by the audience's age, and is a generic term that covers literature for children from infancy through to young adults. Purposes of children's literature is to help that age group understand the world, including values and culture. There are always people controlling children's texts: governments, institutions, industries, creators, teachers and librarians, and of course parents. However, sometimes the things these controllers do and don't let children read is determined by assumptions that are not always accurate.
The idea of 'childhood' is a social construct and society's ideas about childhood has changed over time. It has been shaped by adult ideologies and assumptions. The belief that is widely held is that children's literature should reflect the image we have of children themselves: happy, colourful, innocent. However they also think that children are of lesser intelligence, wild, and lacking discipline. They think children are subconsciously sexist (that boys only like reading stories about other boys, and girls only like reading stories about other girls). Often, the people who control what children do and don't read believe in contradictory ideologies and assumptions. They think that if children read about bad things happening, they will do bad things. If they read violence, they will become violent. In class, we did some myth-busting and thought of some really good examples of texts that break these ideologies. For example, my favourite picture story book 'Jenny Angel' by Margaret Wild has a very sad ending, but it didn't traumatize me and make me hate reading like the assumptions and ideologies said it would. I loved watching 'The Lion King' and reading the 'Harry Potter' books, even though they were about boys. I didn't become violent when I saw violence, like in the movie of 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe' when Aslan's army fights the White Witch's army.
Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Our readings for week 1 were: 'The "everything you ever wanted to know about creative nonfiction, but were too naive and uninformed to ask" workshop stimulation' by Lee Gutkind, 'Twenty Ways to Talk about Creative Nonfiction' by Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz, and 'Reaching one thousand' by Rachel Robertson.
Personal essays talk about something relevant to a wider audience through a personal experience. It's not just about 'What happened to me', but 'what happened to me in relation to the subject at hand'. When writing creative nonfiction, we implement the skills we learned from writing fiction (storytelling, scenes, subjectivity, suspense, frame) with the nonfiction skills of information, structure, research and interviews, and focus. Creative nonfiction is used to teach something and the scenes are the building blocks. The scenes are separated by little blocks of information in a structure that engages the audience enough to want to keep reading, then informs them about things they need to know to understand the story, before drawing them back into said story with another scene.
Which of my subjects interest you? Also, what are your thoughts on the all-in-one blog post? I don't know how else to share this stuff without inundating you with a minimum of four blog posts a week with whatever else I want to share in more posts on top of that... What do you think about my first week of classes? Have you learned anything writerly recently?
- Bonnee
Of course, as it was the first week of classes, there was a lot of generic introductory stuff, which means future posts will probably be longer than this (and I may end up reconsidering doing this all in one post...).
Fiction Writing: Story, Structure, and Starting Out
This is the class that kick-starts the week for me! Our readings were 'Learning Writing Through Reading' by Nigel Krauth and 'The Sentence in Time' by Kevin Brophy.
In the Krauth reading, we looked at the process of reverse engineering, and specifically how it happens in writing. This is when someone pulls apart a story to see how it was made. This is often done with the intention of recreating the story being told. This process sometimes happens subconsciously. More consciously is when it is done because we're thinking about what doesn't work in a story, and what sticks out like a sore thumb. Reverse engineering to find out how something does work often happens subconsciously because unless we are intentionally thinking about how something works, we aren't going to sit there pondering. When it works, it won't distract us from what we're reading, so we don't consciously notice it unless we are looking for it. How many of us writers have read a 'how-to' book? This is reverse engineering from the perspective of another writer. While knowing how to reverse engineer is useful, we have to be careful not to emulate somebody else's work, otherwise we will never write with our own voices. Instead, we should be using this process to find out why we respond to things the way we do.
In the Brophy reading, we examined the creation, use, and purpose of sentences. Sentences in fiction are not all about grammar and punctuation, but about having an experience. As writers, we should be using all of our senses when we form a sentences. Words on their own might mean something, but when we string them together into sentences, we expand their meanings into stories.
Poetry: Making it Strange
This week, we looked into the myth of the myth-maker, Orpheus, the first Greek poet, among other things. We looked at the translation of a poem 'Orpheus and Eurydice' by the Roman poet Virgil, the more modern interpretation of the story called 'Raw Shock' by Toby Fitch, and 'The Sonnets of Orpheus XIII' by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Just a heads up: my teacher for this class, from what I gathered this week, is an absolute basket-case. In other words, I love him, but it's harder to make a coherent, smooth-flowing blog post out of the notes I took. We started the class by answering the questions 'What king of a stain are you?' when he did the roll-call. Then we went on to some Greek words, like poiesis: to make. The prejudice of poets is that the whole world is made through poiesis. The point of writing poetry is to push yourself into thinking: what's the most I can know?
Orpheus was a semi-divine being according to Greek mythology. This led us on to a discussion about why the gods don't write poems. They are not facing death. But then, what is scarier? Knowing you will die, or knowing that you will live forever? As soon as we start writing poems, we become Orpheus. Poets are fetish-ers of words and in the 21st century, there is nothing that can't be put into a poem. I've heard a lot of people saying that all love stories come from Romeo and Juliet, but if you look further back, my class now sees that they all come from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, even if the author isn't aware of it or doesn't choose to name them as such.
The only way to write poetry is to read poetry. When we try, we aim to write an emotion as that emotion, rather than just as a representation of that emotion, so that it plunges the reader into the experience.
Literature for Children and Young Adults
Our reading for this week was 'Why Assumptions Can't be the Whole Truth' by Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer.
Children's literature is one of the few categories specifically defined by the audience's age, and is a generic term that covers literature for children from infancy through to young adults. Purposes of children's literature is to help that age group understand the world, including values and culture. There are always people controlling children's texts: governments, institutions, industries, creators, teachers and librarians, and of course parents. However, sometimes the things these controllers do and don't let children read is determined by assumptions that are not always accurate.
The idea of 'childhood' is a social construct and society's ideas about childhood has changed over time. It has been shaped by adult ideologies and assumptions. The belief that is widely held is that children's literature should reflect the image we have of children themselves: happy, colourful, innocent. However they also think that children are of lesser intelligence, wild, and lacking discipline. They think children are subconsciously sexist (that boys only like reading stories about other boys, and girls only like reading stories about other girls). Often, the people who control what children do and don't read believe in contradictory ideologies and assumptions. They think that if children read about bad things happening, they will do bad things. If they read violence, they will become violent. In class, we did some myth-busting and thought of some really good examples of texts that break these ideologies. For example, my favourite picture story book 'Jenny Angel' by Margaret Wild has a very sad ending, but it didn't traumatize me and make me hate reading like the assumptions and ideologies said it would. I loved watching 'The Lion King' and reading the 'Harry Potter' books, even though they were about boys. I didn't become violent when I saw violence, like in the movie of 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe' when Aslan's army fights the White Witch's army.
Creative Nonfiction: The Personal Essay
Our readings for week 1 were: 'The "everything you ever wanted to know about creative nonfiction, but were too naive and uninformed to ask" workshop stimulation' by Lee Gutkind, 'Twenty Ways to Talk about Creative Nonfiction' by Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz, and 'Reaching one thousand' by Rachel Robertson.
Personal essays talk about something relevant to a wider audience through a personal experience. It's not just about 'What happened to me', but 'what happened to me in relation to the subject at hand'. When writing creative nonfiction, we implement the skills we learned from writing fiction (storytelling, scenes, subjectivity, suspense, frame) with the nonfiction skills of information, structure, research and interviews, and focus. Creative nonfiction is used to teach something and the scenes are the building blocks. The scenes are separated by little blocks of information in a structure that engages the audience enough to want to keep reading, then informs them about things they need to know to understand the story, before drawing them back into said story with another scene.
Which of my subjects interest you? Also, what are your thoughts on the all-in-one blog post? I don't know how else to share this stuff without inundating you with a minimum of four blog posts a week with whatever else I want to share in more posts on top of that... What do you think about my first week of classes? Have you learned anything writerly recently?
- Bonnee
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