Homework for Wednesday

• 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.

Character Sketch

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?) …

The Art of Fiction: Chapter 2

1. Grammar is important. Master the basic rules of the English language.

2. What should "Write what you know" really mean?

• Gardner: write the type of story you know and like the best.
• To add to this: 

• use your personal experiences to better understand human actions and human interaction. 
• use your personal experiences to tap into different emotional and psychological reactions humans have to different situations.

• Nobody needs to equate "Write what you know" to personal biography. That's too reductive of a lesson. That phrase means: If you have lost a love one under X type of circumstances, you better understand loss of any kind than someone who can only imagine types of grief. What your experiences give you is emotional knowledge of the human condition, which is invaluable to the writer. You can empathize!

3. Verisimilitude! The ability to be consistent in the world you create, and to make that world plausible -- even if the world is surreal or absurd or in some other way extraordinary.

• Truth doesn't make the story. Characters and events must be interesting and convincing.
• Use foreshadowing details, flashbacks, and other clues in the plot to keep us reading.
• Use concrete images based on your study of human behavior and physiology. 
• Vivid imagery: detail, detail, detail. 

4. Again, you can't be experimental if you don't know what is traditional. Good, fresh writing comes from a need to study what's already been written--and how it was.

Read Chapter 3, "Interest and Truth," for Wednesday's class.

56 Best Worst Analogies & HW for Monday, 3/31

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 3/31: 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?

The Art of Fiction: Chapter 1

1. "Art depends heavily on feeling, intuition, taste."

2. "There are no rules of real fiction.... There are techniques...--that, like carpenter's tricks, can be studied and taught; there are moral and aesthetic considerations every serious writer must sooner or later brood on a little....There are common mistakes...."

• Techniques
• Moral and aesthetic considerations
• mistakes (in the logic of the world we create, in consistency of character, etc.)

3. "Invention, after all, is art's main business...."

4.  A writer's authority: 

• "sane humanness"
• trust in ability to judge writing and the world

5.  We want to practice techniques so that they become "second nature."

6. Great art comes from an education in the arts. To Gardner and you I say: how can you write something fresh, something experimental, if you don't know what the world has already provided?

• "No one can hope to write really well if he [or she] has not learned how to analyze fiction--how to recognize symbol when it jumps at him [or her], how to make out theme in a literary work, how to account for a writer's selection and organization of fictional details."

7.

Empathy and Literary Fiction

Literary fiction, by contrast, focuses more on the psychology of characters and their relationships. “Often those characters’ minds are depicted vaguely, without many details, and we’re forced to fill in the gaps to understand their intentions and motivations,” Kidd says. This genre prompts the reader to imagine the characters’ introspective dialogues. This psychological awareness carries over into the real world, which is full of complicated individuals whose inner lives are usually difficult to fathom.

The Virtues of Poetry: Revising

1. Refrains have a higher purpose: tone, meaning...

2. Verb Tense Shifts: intending them can add experience to a poem, making the poem not just about what is said but how it is being said and who is saying it...

3. The Sound of Thinking:

• The meditative
• The calculative

4. Parallel Syntaxes

• we came unwanted, we saw materials, we delivered measals

5. Using asides to integrate emotional mindset of speaker

6. The power of detail--restrain from emotion and saying by focusing on description of what can be see, heard, smelled, etc. (Bishop and Lowell)

7. Why do we write poems? Why did I write this poem?