AGENDA:
Master class:
Neil Gaiman finding your voice
Writing: work on character-based short story for workshop next week
Thursday, February 27, 2020
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
Writing in 2nd person/Lorrie Moore
Writing in 2nd person/Lorrie Moore
AGENDA:
AGENDA:
Read aloud Lorrie Moore stories
Lorrie Moore on Writing:
https://lithub.com/lorrie-moore-its-better-to-write-than-be-a-writer/
https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/5-writing-tips-from-lorrie-moore/
Writing in the Second Person POV
What is the Second Person?
Excellent blog post:
http://www.eclecticeditor.com/2012/10/effective-narration-101-second-person-narration/
An example from
www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1200131-That-Second-Person
Let us talk about writing, just me and you. Pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable. Pour a cup of joe, or whatever your favorite poison is. Settle in and we'll get down to the nitty gritty. I can go on for hours about this writing business, but I won't take up too much of your time today. Writing is one my favorite subjects. I'm thinking it might be yours too. Why do I think it might be yours? Well, you're here aren't you? That's a pretty good indication. I could be wrong though, and I'm more than willing to admit that. But let's talk a bit if you don't mind.
See this paragraph above? That's one way to use the second person properly, when directly addressing someone. I'm addressing you, the reader and possible writer, directly. The paragraph is written with a specific audience in mind, not a general one. I blame my first college professor for my pet peeve about the misuse of the second person. He pounded it into my freshmen skull many years ago that "you" had no place in any essay except for extraordinary circumstances. When I had him again for nearly every other English class, that lesson was simply emphasized in other writings. Other professors touched on it in literature, but he really sent it home.
I mostly blame advertisement for the misuse of the second person in new writing. I don't know how many times I have driven my family to distraction because I've absentmindedly disagreed with an advertisement. Listen to those things sometime - advertisements. Most of them are trying to target a specific market, but the way the commercials are written is so broad. The net thrown tries to catch as many people as possible. The public at large is included in the message. "You" is inclusive. The message is worded so everyone hearing it is led to believe they need that product or service by the simple use of that one little word. It's no wonder beginning writers use it in their writing; they're exposed to it constantly.
Another reason some beginning writers use the second person incorrectly is because they are "telling the tale." Most people learn to talk before they learn to write, and more people are better at telling stories than writing them. When beginning writers start to write the stories in their heads, often things become lost in the translation. Oral telling is different than the written word, and some writers don't make the distinction between what's said and what's written. When storytellers have an audience in front of them, they can say "It's so black that you can't see your hand in front of your face..." or "...the wind's so cold it'll cut right through ya." Storytellers talk directly to their audience. Even if the audience doesn't "feel" the cold, the use of the second person can bring them deeper into the story.
It can be done; Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tim Robbins is a fictional novel written in second person, and there are several short stories which use the second person well, but they are rare. Also, the "choose your own adventure" genre of fiction has often been written in second person. Now that the Internet is so well established, interactive stories and many role playing forums are perfect homes for fictional stories that incorporate the second person.
In non-fiction writing, the use of the second person is commonplace. As in this opening sentence from Take Control of Your Sales by Sonya Carmichael Jones, "Regardless of your writing genre, marketing is the primary means by which your book sales are generated." This article addresses a specific audience, the book writer who wants to sell books. By inserting "you" into the article, the author attempts to draw the writer in and make the article personal. Such casual writing is routine nowadays. However, the above sentence could just have easily been written, "Regardless of genre, marketing is the primary means by which book sales are generated." Both are correct, it's simply a matter of preference.
If used properly, use of the second person can draw the reader into a piece like no other word. Such as this statement: "If you're one of the millions of people in the United States who has ever..." It is written directly to a specific audience. It attempts to hook that audience immediately. Hopefully, anyone who falls into the category of the article will read the rest of article with interest. Those who do not fall under the umbrella of whatever the article covers will most likely not read it. However, since they are not the intended audience, the use of the second person has fulfilled a purpose as well.
Using the second person is the easy way, but it can alienate half the readers in the blink of an eye. Consider an article written about some extreme sport where the author has written "... and you feel the rush of wind screaming through your hair. This is why you dig freefall, the rush..." Well, there went all of his sensitive bald readers and anyone who's never felt freefall, or those who don't "dig" it.
Using the second person can be a very powerful tool in an author's toolkit. But if it's used incorrectly it can gum up the works good and proper. Generally, try not to use the second person in an essay or a fictional story that is not aimed at a specific audience. There are always exceptions of course. What would this wonderful language be without exceptions? In my opinion, there are ways to get around using the second person - notice how I have not used it since the first paragraph except in quotations? A writer simply has to be creative. It's more fun that way. Is there a better way to enhance writing skills than finding more creative ways to say things? I can't think of one.
Well, I enjoyed this time with you. I hope you did too. Thanks for coming by and listening to me voice my opinion. It was a blast. I've got to get on to other things, but I hope you'll stop by again soon.
Take care.
from
www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1200131-That-Second-Person
Group #1 Wikipedia on second person narrative:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-person_narrative
Group #2 Why you should write in 2nd person:
http://thewritepractice.com/second-person/
Group #3 Writing in second person:
http://www.chuffedbuffbooks.com/writing-in-second-person-atwood-to-tolstoy/
Two more short stories in 2nd person
http://42opus.com/shortstory/secondperson
And more
http://www.goodreads.com/story/tag/second-person
Lorrie Moore:
http://www.shortstoryproject.com/how-to-talk-to-your-mother-notes/
http://juked.com/2013/02/micah-stack-how-to-write-a-story.asp
and Italo Calvino
http://www.tcomer.faculty.defiance.edu/calvino/ifon.htm
Read aloud Lorrie Moore stories
Lorrie Moore on Writing:
https://lithub.com/lorrie-moore-its-better-to-write-than-be-a-writer/
https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/5-writing-tips-from-lorrie-moore/
Writing in the Second Person
Writing in the Second Person POV
What is the Second Person?
Excellent blog post:
http://www.eclecticeditor.com/2012/10/effective-narration-101-second-person-narration/
An example from
www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1200131-That-Second-Person
Let us talk about writing, just me and you. Pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable. Pour a cup of joe, or whatever your favorite poison is. Settle in and we'll get down to the nitty gritty. I can go on for hours about this writing business, but I won't take up too much of your time today. Writing is one my favorite subjects. I'm thinking it might be yours too. Why do I think it might be yours? Well, you're here aren't you? That's a pretty good indication. I could be wrong though, and I'm more than willing to admit that. But let's talk a bit if you don't mind.
See this paragraph above? That's one way to use the second person properly, when directly addressing someone. I'm addressing you, the reader and possible writer, directly. The paragraph is written with a specific audience in mind, not a general one. I blame my first college professor for my pet peeve about the misuse of the second person. He pounded it into my freshmen skull many years ago that "you" had no place in any essay except for extraordinary circumstances. When I had him again for nearly every other English class, that lesson was simply emphasized in other writings. Other professors touched on it in literature, but he really sent it home.
I mostly blame advertisement for the misuse of the second person in new writing. I don't know how many times I have driven my family to distraction because I've absentmindedly disagreed with an advertisement. Listen to those things sometime - advertisements. Most of them are trying to target a specific market, but the way the commercials are written is so broad. The net thrown tries to catch as many people as possible. The public at large is included in the message. "You" is inclusive. The message is worded so everyone hearing it is led to believe they need that product or service by the simple use of that one little word. It's no wonder beginning writers use it in their writing; they're exposed to it constantly.
Another reason some beginning writers use the second person incorrectly is because they are "telling the tale." Most people learn to talk before they learn to write, and more people are better at telling stories than writing them. When beginning writers start to write the stories in their heads, often things become lost in the translation. Oral telling is different than the written word, and some writers don't make the distinction between what's said and what's written. When storytellers have an audience in front of them, they can say "It's so black that you can't see your hand in front of your face..." or "...the wind's so cold it'll cut right through ya." Storytellers talk directly to their audience. Even if the audience doesn't "feel" the cold, the use of the second person can bring them deeper into the story.
It can be done; Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tim Robbins is a fictional novel written in second person, and there are several short stories which use the second person well, but they are rare. Also, the "choose your own adventure" genre of fiction has often been written in second person. Now that the Internet is so well established, interactive stories and many role playing forums are perfect homes for fictional stories that incorporate the second person.
In non-fiction writing, the use of the second person is commonplace. As in this opening sentence from Take Control of Your Sales by Sonya Carmichael Jones, "Regardless of your writing genre, marketing is the primary means by which your book sales are generated." This article addresses a specific audience, the book writer who wants to sell books. By inserting "you" into the article, the author attempts to draw the writer in and make the article personal. Such casual writing is routine nowadays. However, the above sentence could just have easily been written, "Regardless of genre, marketing is the primary means by which book sales are generated." Both are correct, it's simply a matter of preference.
If used properly, use of the second person can draw the reader into a piece like no other word. Such as this statement: "If you're one of the millions of people in the United States who has ever..." It is written directly to a specific audience. It attempts to hook that audience immediately. Hopefully, anyone who falls into the category of the article will read the rest of article with interest. Those who do not fall under the umbrella of whatever the article covers will most likely not read it. However, since they are not the intended audience, the use of the second person has fulfilled a purpose as well.
Using the second person is the easy way, but it can alienate half the readers in the blink of an eye. Consider an article written about some extreme sport where the author has written "... and you feel the rush of wind screaming through your hair. This is why you dig freefall, the rush..." Well, there went all of his sensitive bald readers and anyone who's never felt freefall, or those who don't "dig" it.
Using the second person can be a very powerful tool in an author's toolkit. But if it's used incorrectly it can gum up the works good and proper. Generally, try not to use the second person in an essay or a fictional story that is not aimed at a specific audience. There are always exceptions of course. What would this wonderful language be without exceptions? In my opinion, there are ways to get around using the second person - notice how I have not used it since the first paragraph except in quotations? A writer simply has to be creative. It's more fun that way. Is there a better way to enhance writing skills than finding more creative ways to say things? I can't think of one.
Well, I enjoyed this time with you. I hope you did too. Thanks for coming by and listening to me voice my opinion. It was a blast. I've got to get on to other things, but I hope you'll stop by again soon.
Take care.
from
www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1200131-That-Second-Person
Group #1 Wikipedia on second person narrative:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-person_narrative
Group #2 Why you should write in 2nd person:
http://thewritepractice.com/second-person/
Group #3 Writing in second person:
http://www.chuffedbuffbooks.com/writing-in-second-person-atwood-to-tolstoy/
Two more short stories in 2nd person
http://42opus.com/shortstory/secondperson
And more
http://www.goodreads.com/story/tag/second-person
Lorrie Moore:
http://www.shortstoryproject.com/how-to-talk-to-your-mother-notes/
http://juked.com/2013/02/micah-stack-how-to-write-a-story.asp
and Italo Calvino
http://www.tcomer.faculty.defiance.edu/calvino/ifon.htm
Monday, February 10, 2020
Thursday, February 6, 2020
"The Bath"/"Tell the Women We're Going"/Characterization
AGENDA:
Characterization:
http://learn.lexiconic.net/characters.htm
Go over Carver short stories.
https://www.enotes.com/topics/bath-raymond-carver
http://webs.anokaramsey.edu/stankey/Eng2235/Docs2235/Exam3/Carver2.htm
http://sittingbee.com/tell-the-women-were-going-raymond-carver/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6cCbUGwO2M
New contest:
Through Their Eyes:
https://youngwritersusa.com/contests/through-their-eyes/#download_links
Characterization:
http://learn.lexiconic.net/characters.htm
Go over Carver short stories.
https://www.enotes.com/topics/bath-raymond-carver
http://webs.anokaramsey.edu/stankey/Eng2235/Docs2235/Exam3/Carver2.htm
http://sittingbee.com/tell-the-women-were-going-raymond-carver/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6cCbUGwO2M
New contest:
Through Their Eyes:
https://youngwritersusa.com/contests/through-their-eyes/#download_links
Tuesday, February 4, 2020
fiction Prompts
Fiction Warm-up Exercises/Brian Kiteley
A Selection of Fiction Exercises, fromThe 3 A.M. Epiphany
Published by Writers Digest Books
Copyright Brian Kiteley (clicking on this will take you back to my home page)
Take a look at some sample �exercises from The 4 A.M. Breakthrough, which has just been published.
1. Synesthesia, according to M.H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms, is a description of “one kind of sensation in terms of another; color is attributed to sounds, odor to colors, sound to odors, and so on.” Here is an example of synesthesia from Bruno Schulz’s Street of the Crocodiles: “Adela would plunge the rooms into semidarkness by drawing down the linen blinds. All colors immediately fell an octave lower [my italics]; the room filled with shadows, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea and the light was reflected in mirrors of green water.” Schulz describes a change in color by means of a musical term. Writers consciously and unconsciously employ this peculiar method to convey the irreducible complexity of life onto the page. Diane Ackerman (in A Natural History of the Senses) feels we are born with this wonderful “intermingling” of senses: “A creamy blur of succulent blue sounds smells like week-old strawberries dropped into a tin sieve as mother approaches in a halo of color, chatter, and perfume like thick golden butterscotch. Newborns ride on intermingling waves of sight, sound, touch, taste, and, especially, smell.” Use synesthesia in a short scene—surreptitiously, without drawing too much attention to it—to convey to your reader an important understanding of some ineffable sensory experience. Use “sight, sound, touch, taste, and, especially, smell.” 600 words.
2. Deja Vu. Write a 500-word sketch of a scene in which a character has an experience that causes her to recall a startlingly similar past experience. Juxtapose the two scenes, the present one and the past one, on top of each other, writing, for instance, two or three sentences of the present moment, then alternating back and forth between present and past that way. Show the reader the remembered scene by use of Italics. Why would a character be haunted like this? Think of a convincing reason for the deja vu experience. Or don’t worry too much about convincing reasons—just let some strange set of events impinge on the present moment of your character. Be playful with the relationship. Simple advice to beginners: don’t be heavy-handed. It’s easier said than done, I know, but you can train yourself to relax and honor your readers with difficult and unusual human patterns of behavior. Always flatter your readers by proposing a complex and unexpected reality.
3. The Reluctant “I.” Write a 600-word first-person story in which you use the first person pronoun (“I” or “me” or “my”) only two times—but keep the “I” somehow important to the narrative you’re constructing. The point of this exercise is to imagine a narrator who is less interested in himself or herself than in what he or she is observing. You can make your narrator someone who sees a very interesting event in which she is not necessarily a participant. Or you can make him self-effacing yet a major participant in the events related. The people we tend to like most are those who are much more interested in other people than in themselves, selfless and caring, whose conversation is not a stream of self-involved remarks (like the guy who, after speaking about himself to a woman at a party for half an hour, says, “Enough about me, what do you think of me?”). Another lesson you might learn from this exercise is how important it is to let things and events speak for themselves, beyond the ego of the narration. It is very important in this exercise to make sure your reader is not surprised, forty or fifty words into the piece, to realize that this is a first person narration. Show us quickly who is observing the scene.
4. Body English. Write a “conversation” in which no words are said. This exercise is meant to challenge you to work with gesture, body language (or, as a baseball announcer I heard once misspeak it, body English), all the things we convey to each other without words. We often learn more about characters in stories from the things characters do with their hands than from what they say. It might be best to have some stranger observe this conversation, rather than showing us the thoughts of one of the people involved in the conversation, because the temptation to tell us what the conversation is about is so great from inside the conversation. “I was doing the opposite of Freud,” Desmond Morris says, of his famous book The Naked Ape that first studied the ways humans speak with their bodies. “He listened to people and didn’t watch; I watched people and didn’t listen.” Because of Morris, according to Cassandra Jardine, “when politicians scratch their noses they are now assumed to be lying—and the sight of the Queen [Elizabeth] crossing her legs at the ankles is known to be a signal that her status is too high for her to need to show sexual interest by crossing them further up.” Autistic children cannot understand human conversation even when they understand individual words because they cannot read facial expressions, which is clear evidence of how important other forms of language are. 600 words.
5. The First Lie. Tape-record a conversation. It’s a tried and true method of understanding how people talk, but still surprisingly effective. Obtain permission of the people you are taping. Instruct your group each to tell one small lie during the session, only one lie. Tell them, if they get curious, that some philosophers think that deception was a crucial learned behavior in the emergence of modern consciousness several thousand years ago. You can participate in the conversation yourself, but don’t become an interviewer. Let the machine run for a good long while, allowing your friends to become comfortable and less aware of the tape recorder. Listen to the tape a day or two later. Play it several times. Choose some small part of the conversation to transcribe (the lies may be interesting, if you can spot them, but more interesting should be all the other stuff they say). Transcribe as faithfully as you can. Do not transcribe more than one page of talk. After that, fill out the conversation with information about the people who are speaking, giving us only details about them that we need to know. The final product should be no longer than two pages long, double-spaced.
6. Phone Tag. Write a fairly long, complicated phone conversation overheard by someone in the room. All three people—the listener in the room, the caller, and the person on the other end of the line—are involved with each other in some way (not necessarily romantically). Let us hear the other end of the conversation, without actually hearing it. This means you will be giving us only one side of a conversation, so you will have to work to make the side we’re hearing intriguing and capable of carrying a story. The listener in the room can guess what the person on the other end of the line is saying, but try to keep this guessing to a minimum, and make sure this guesswork is done with integrity—well after the unheard speaker has spoken. 600 words.
7. Underground History. Reread your own older fiction—one story or as many as you want to. Find the ten most common words from this fiction (excluding small and uninteresting words). Use these words as hidden titles for ten paragraphs of prose. By hidden, I mean that you should operate as in the above exercise, but after several rough drafts, eliminate the titles. Choosing these ten words is obviously going to be somewhat subjective, unless you have a program that allows you to do some of the work for you (for instance, you could pick a word that seems to occur commonly, then do a MS Word global search—the find icon under edit). This exercise may help you uncover the trends and unexpected subject matter of your fiction.
8. Backwards. Write a story backwards. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’sChronicle of a Death Foretold works this way, more or less. Murder mysteries are told backwards, in a sense. Most stories we tell orally we tell from the middle forward until someone tells us we’ve left out important details, then we double back. You might try taking one of your own short pieces—or someone else’s—and simply reversing the sentences. What then? Unless you’re very lucky, you’ll have to do a good deal to make this reversed piece of prose make sense. Make sure this does not become simply a device. The structure should be inherently useful to the material, which is good advice for any fiction. 500 words.
9. Jointly Held Story. Speak the beginning of a story with someone else. Choose someone you know well, who also writes, but that’s not a necessity. Choose a good storyteller. Do this in a relatively private place, where you won’t be interrupted. One person starts the story and continues for a few sentences. The next person continues for another few sentences, and so on for a while. You don’t need to start up right away after the other person has finished his or her bit. End when you feel things getting exciting. Both speakers should go away from the experience and write down what they remember of the story, but don’t write the tale down right away. Let it sit in your memories for a day or so. Don’t play games of one-upmanship with your partner. Be faithful to the growing story and the characters created on the spur of the moment. Listen to the other person’s quirks of storytelling. Let someone else’s manner of creating a story guide you and influence your own story-telling style. The two stories that result from this exercise ought to be quite different from one another. 1,000 words.
10. Home. “Some women marry houses,” says the poet Anne Sexton, meaning presumably that these women marry not men but the ideal of house and home. The different etymologies of these two words are instructive. Home originally referred to village or hometown. House has in its earlier meanings the notion of hiding, of enclosing oneself. Now house indicates any house, and home is the place that is central to our notions of ourselves. Use a home in a story fragment (500 words). Think about the power of rooms (kitchens, basements, unfinished attics, walk-in closets) on psychology and conversation. In this fragment, make the house a unique participant (though a passive one) in the unfolding events. The room need not be in a typical house. Think about all the other rooms we become familiar with—classrooms, office cubicles, publictoilets. What are their personalities? How do the more public spaces we inhabit affect our behaviors? You might consider keeping several characters permanently stuck in different rooms in a house, communicating by shouts, cell phones, intercoms, Dixie cups, or telepathy.
11. In the Belly of the Beast. Describe an unusual interior space, one with lots of interesting appurtenances and gadgets sticking out: a submarine, a small plane, a subway tunnel away from the platform, a boiler room in the sub-basement of a high rise building. Again, do not yield to the easy use of this scene. The boiler room, for instance, we all expect to hide a creepy axe murderer-type. Put two innocent children in it instead, romping and playing among the glow and roar of the fire and steam vents as if this were a sunny playground (their father is the superintendent of the building, and he prefers to keep the kids where he can see them). 500 words.
12. Absent. Construct a character who is not present. You have many options here: people may talk about this character before meeting him, or after meeting her; you might choose to examine what this character owns, how he or she lives, under what conditions; you might use indirect approaches, like letters or documents that attest to the existence but not presence of the person. How do we know of people? Examine the ways we build characters in our minds and in our social environments before and after we meet them.
13. Ways of Seeing. Imagine a person with an idiosyncratic way of seeing the world (for instance, an occasional drug dealer, who, because of his amateur status, is more than usually prone to seeing danger where there is none; an entomologist who tends to categorize the world dryly, as if seen through a microscope; a world-class athlete whose clarity of vision is almost hallucinogenic). Have this character witness a traumatic event that does not directly involve him or her. Narrate the event from a first-person point of view, making sure that the perspective is carefully built around the idiosyncrasies of this personality. Also, as a hidden aspect of this character, imagine him or her as some kind of unusual animal. 600 words.
14. Loveless. Create a character around this sentence: Nobody has ever loved me as much I have loved them. Do not use this sentence in the fragment of fiction you write. The sentence comes from Guy Davenport’s aunt, Mary Elizabeth Davenport Morrow, via his essay “On Reading” inThe Hunter Gracchus. Resist the temptation this exercise offers for a completely self-indulgent character. Of course, some self-indulgence will be fun with this character. But don’t write from inside your own wounded sense of the world. 500 words.
15. Loving. Write about a person you love. This apparently simple instruction may be more difficult than you think. What makes us love people? How do we avoid being sentimental when describing the attributes that make someone loveable? You will immediately be faced with the decision of writing about someone you love or loved romantically or as a friend. Or perhaps you’ll choose a family member. Your greatest challenge will be to make your reader love this person, too. 600 words.
16. Improvisation. Put two characters in a situation that demands improvisation, on both parts, which also demands that the two characters interact and compromise with each other in the improvisation. We should be able to observe the surprise, pleasure, and frustration that result from this improvisation. Remember that most of life involves one form of improvisation or another. Beginning writers tend to control their characters too much, so in this exercise you should work hard to let the characters surprise themselves as well as you. 500 words.
17. True Feeling. Using language that is simple and straightforward, describe intensely and exhaustively a moment of true feeling between two characters. Meryl Streep says that when she’s researching a character she’s going to portray, she always gives the character some simple secret that no one on the set, none of the other actors, and none of the other characters knows about. Give the character you’re showing us this moment of true feeling through a secret, but don’t reveal the secret either to us or to the other character.
18. Teacher. In a 500-word scene, have one character teach another character something that changes the teacher. But this exercise asks you to go another step beyond the first layer of reality. It should teach you how to play with more than one level in your fiction. The teacher learning something from her student is surprising, though not so unusual as you may think. The audience is moved by Rose’s tragic learning curve in the movie Titanic. Imagine how much more interesting the film might have been had Jack learned something from what he taught Rose, rather than simply dying handsomely.
19. The Bunny Planet. Rosemary Wells has written a trilogy of children’s books collectively called Voyage to the Bunny Planet. The basic problem she sets for each book is that a child (in the form of a young bunny) has a bad day (in prose). Halfway through each little book, an unseen narrator intervenes and says that the child in question “needs a visit to the Bunny Planet.” Everything alters in this other world, first of all by changing to rhyming poetry. The world is better after we hear the words, “Far beyond the moon and stars/Twenty light years south of Mars,/Spins the gentle Bunny Planet/And the Bunny Queen is Janet.” Wells encourages children, in these wonderful books, to rethink their world, to take an emotional timeout and find a better world than the one children frequently find themselves stuck in—chaos, messes, tantrums, sickness, loneliness. What I want you to do in this exercise is only very tangentially linked to this trilogy. Use this hinge device that Wells employs so deftly. For the first part of your 500-word piece, tinge the world in darker hues, show us a narrative style that reflects frustration, sadness, alienation, whatever. Then, with a phrase a little like this central phrase of Wells’s, change everything—especially the narrative method. Wells goes from a very dense and quite beautiful prose (almost prose poetry, as the best children’s literature is) to this light rhyming style (although she does not stick to one method of rhyme—she uses couplets, quatrains, etc.).
20. The Argument. Two people are arguing—a man and a woman. They don’t have to be a couple. Each is convinced he or she is right. You, as the writer, do not know—and do not want to know—who is right, but you will have exquisite sympathy for both points of view, both sides of the argument. How do men and women argue differently? Couples tend to disagree over relatively minor issues, which often stand for larger issues. Give us enough background and history, but try to stay in the moment as much as possible. Narrative PoV is going to matter here a great deal: writing from one or the other’s PoV is likely to make it very difficult to show both sides fairly. An omniscient narration may seem to be the answer, but I don’t like omniscient narration—I don’t think it’s really possible in fiction about contemporary life. Choose an accidental arbitrator—a third party narrator, either first or third person narration. This narrator knows and likes both these people well, but doesn’t and can’t favor one over the other.� 600 words.
21. Standup. The usual method of the standup comedian monologue is apparently casual connections. For instance, Elvira Kurt once started a monologue with the simple idea of bad hair. “As a five-year old, you never had bad hair days. You woke up with hair straight up, and you said, ‘I look great! I slept in my swimsuit and I feel wonderful!’ Mother made clothes for me—horrible outfits. She probably laughed herself to death. I got back at her. When I told her I was gay I said it was because of those clothes.” Note the deliberate movement from plain detail to plain detail, with great leaps between the details—the mother making clothes to the coming-out declaration. We are not expecting this transition (nor for that matter the simpler transition from bad hair to mother making clothes). But the transitions are funny, and they affect us, shock us even in this day and age. Write a 600-word standup comedy monologue, fitting it into a story situation you’ve already begun working on. Don’t make it obvious to your reader that you are doing a stand-up routine—just tell a story as if you were doing a monologue in front of a smoky, irritable audience, with a Late Show talent scout scribbling notes at the bar in the back.
22. The Joke. End a 600-word fragment of a story with a joke you like or loathe. Use the joke as a way of coloring the whole passage, but don’t just lead up to the joke. The joke should be relatively short, and it might be better if the joke is somewhat odd. A guy walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, “I’ll have one g-g-gin and t-tonic, p-p-please.” The bartender says, “One g-gin and t-tonic c-c-coming up.” The customer glares suspiciously at the bartender, who smiles innocently. Another patron walks into the bar and says, “Scotch on the rocks, barkeep.” The bartender says, “One Scotch rocks, coming right up.” A moment later he brings the gin and tonic to the first customer, who says, “You were m-m-mimick-k-king m-m-me.” The bartender, with a truly pained look on his face, says, “N-n-no. I was m-m-mimicking that other g-guy.”
23. Outrunning the Critic. Write 100 short sentences about a character you are working on in a piece of fiction. The sentences should not connect and should not follow one another in any logical way. The idea of this exercise is to force you to outrun your own thoughts and intelligence and critical mind. Be careful not to be monotonous, using the name of your character or a pronoun to start each sentence. A better exercise would be to write 200 or 500 sentences about this character, but 100 sentences is still enough of a stretch to make this useful. The idea for this exercise comes from a collaboration the poet John Yau did with a painter, which was to match 1,000 small watercolors with sentences byYau. John Yau is the author of Edificio Sayonara, Forbidden Entries,and Hawaiian Cowboys, among other books.
24. Rehearsal. Imitate the method of actors rehearsing a scene, repeating lines and whole sections of a speech, going over mistakes, etc., with several familiar characters of yours. Use this social trial and error to find new, submerged material for your story. You should think of this exercise as artificial and behind-the- scenes work, but it may also trigger strangely realistic conversation. Human beings constantly rehearse and re-rehearse their lines. The anarchic rhythm of conversation is more akin to a social science experiment than to the polish of theatrical dialogue.
25. Surprise. Write a short scene about a character you’ve become familiar with over time—either your own fictional creation or a character based on someone you know. Start the scene by letting the character do what you expect this character to do. But at some point in the sequence of events, allow the character to do something completely out of character. Let the character surprise you. This exercise demands that you consider what is expected and unexpected in a character. You may want to make a list, behind the writing of this scene, of the kinds of things this character usually does; and another list of the sorts of things this character would never do.
Raymond Carver
AGENDA:
GO TO LIBRARY FOR RAYMOND CARVER BOOK
HMWK: Next Wednesday---READ Carver TITLE STORY AND: "The Bath" and "Tell the Women We're Going"
Short Story: Popular Mechanics by Raymond Carver
E A R L Y that day the weather turned, and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too. He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door. I’m glad you’re leaving! I’m glad you’re leaving! She said. Do you hear? He kept on putting his things into the suitcase.
Son of a bitch! I’m so glad you’re leaving! She began to cry. You can’t even look me in the face, can you? Then she noticed the baby’s picture on the bed and picked it up.
He looked at her, and she wiped her eyes and stared at him before turning and going back to the living room.
Bring that back, he said. Just get your things and get out, she said. He did not answer. He fastened the suitcase, put on his coat, looked around the bedroom before turning off the light. Then he went out to the living room. She stood in the doorway of the little kitchen, holding the baby.
I want the baby, he said. Are you crazy? No, but I want the baby. I’ll get someone to come by for his things. The baby had begun to cry, and she uncovered the blanket from around his head. Oh, oh, she said, looking at the baby.
He moved toward her. For God’s sake! she said. She took a step back into the kitchen. I want the baby.
Get out of here!She turned and tried to hold the baby over in a corner behind the stove. But he came up. He reached across the stove and tightened his hands on the baby. Let go of him, he said.
Get away, get away! she cried. The baby was red-faced and screaming. In the scuffle, they knocked down a flowerpot that hung behind the stove. He crowded her into the wall then, trying to break her grip. He held on to the baby and pushed with all his weight.
Get out of here!She turned and tried to hold the baby over in a corner behind the stove. But he came up. He reached across the stove and tightened his hands on the baby. Let go of him, he said.
Get away, get away! she cried. The baby was red-faced and screaming. In the scuffle, they knocked down a flowerpot that hung behind the stove. He crowded her into the wall then, trying to break her grip. He held on to the baby and pushed with all his weight.
Let go of him, he said. Don’t, she said. You’re hurting the baby, she said.
I’m not hurting the baby, he said. The kitchen window gave no light. In the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder. She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.
I’m not hurting the baby, he said. The kitchen window gave no light. In the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder. She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.
No! she screamed just as her hands came loose.
She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back. But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.
She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back. But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.
In this manner, the issue was decided.
Interview with Carver:
Raymond Carver was a short-story writer credited with revitalizing the form in the United States during the 1970s and '80s. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Carver spent most of his childhood in Yakima, Washington. He moved to California in 1958 and took up writing in the early 1960s. During the 1960s he worked as a textbook editor, lecturer and teacher while writing, and published several short stories and his first book, Winter Insomnia (1970). His 1976 collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? established his reputation and featured some of his trademarks: alcohol, poverty and ordinary people in ordinary but desperate situations. Carver, who also taught writing and wrote poetry, has been called a "minimalist" because of his spare and realistic fiction, and has been compared to Ernest Hemingway and Anton Chekhov. In the late 1970s Carver required hospitalization four times in under two years for acute alcoholism. By the mid-1980s, however, he was sober, writing full-time and married to the poet Tess Gallagher (it was his second marriage). He died at the age of fifty from lung cancer, and his last collection of stories, Where I'm Calling From, was published posthumously in 1989. His collections of poetry include Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985) and Ultramarine (1986).
Short Stories
AGENDA:
Classic Short stories online:
http://www.classicshorts.com/author.html\
http://www.classicreader.com/browse/6/p/title/
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/writers-as-architects/?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FCarver%2C%20Raymond&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=collection&_r=0
Raymond Carver:
The dirty-realism school of writing became popular in the 1980s thanks to a group of writers who began writing about middle-class characters who faced disappointments, heartbreaks, and harsh truths in their ordinary lives. Granta, a highly regarded literary journal, coined the term dirty realism in 1983 when it published its eighth issue, which featured writers from this school. Granta 8, as the issue became known, included stories by Angela Carter, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, and many others. Although each of these dirty-realism writers has a distinctive style, they are connected by their sparse prose, simple language with few adjectives or adverbs and direct descriptions of ordinary people and events. Much of the fiction published in the New Yorker, where many of these writers were and are still published, is of the dirty-realism school, but today the term—as well as the practice—has somewhat fallen out of fashion. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” was published in 1981, at the height of the dirty-realism movement, and the story is often regarded as the prime example of the form.
Critics have aligned Carver with minimalist writers because of his truncated prose and elliptical delineation of characters and events in the volume What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, in which Esquire magazine claimed that Carver had “reinvented the short story.” The stories of this collection, which reach extremes of stark understatement, have been called spare and knowing masterpieces by some reviewers and laconic, empty failures by others. Specifically, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” has been described by some commentators as a story where nothing really happens, but others see it as a demonstration of the barely-furnished nature of Carver's distinctive style. Most critics laud the impact and power of the stories in the collection, including “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.” Scholars have praised the realistic and evocative dialogue of the couples in the story as well as Carver's use of irony. Critically and popularly, Carver is acknowledged as a profound influence on contemporary writers and literature, and stories such as “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” are considered valuable, original contributions to the American short fiction genre.
Themes
The Elusive Nature of Love
The nature of love remains elusive throughout “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” despite the characters’ best efforts to define it. Mel tries again and again to pinpoint the meaning of love, but his examples never build up to any coherent conclusion. For example, he tells his friends about an elderly couple who nearly died in a car crash, but the conclusion of the story—the old man depressed by not being able to see his wife—merely confuses everyone. When he asserts that he’ll tell everyone exactly what love is, he instead digresses into a muddled meditation about how strange it is that he and the others have loved more than one person. His attempts to clarify the nature of love eventually devolve into a bitter tirade against his ex-wife. He seems much more certain about what love is not and tells Terri several times that if abusive love is true love, then she “can have it.”
Laura and Nick believe that they know what love is, but they never really provide a clear definition or explain why they’re so certain in their convictions. They merely demonstrate their love for each other by blushing and holding hands, but these actions simply support the mystery of love rather than unmask it. Terri, of all the friends, seems to be most certain about the meaning of love and repeatedly claims that her abusive ex-boyfriend, Ed, truly loved her, despite his crazy way of showing it. The examples she provides of this love—beating, stalking, and threatening—are disturbing but serve as proof in her mind. Like the others, however, she cannot translate her certainty into any kind of clear explanation of the nature of love.
The Inadequacy of Language
Although the four friends talk for a while about love, the fact that they never manage to define it suggests that language can’t adequately describe emotional, abstract subjects. Mel does the most talking, but his bloated stories and rambling digressions show that he has trouble conveying his thoughts and feelings, despite how much he talks. Terri speaks a great deal about her former lover Ed, but when Mel challenges her, she turns to intuition to prove her point. She believes that Ed loved her no matter what Mel or the others think, demonstrating that gut feelings about love can be more powerful and accurate than words. Laura and Nick, meanwhile, say very little about the nature of love and instead rely on physical gestures to clarify what language cannot: they hold hands, blush, and touch each other’s legs. Carver indicates that words simply aren’t enough when talking about love, which is probably why all four friends have fallen silent by the end of the story.
Motifs
Drinking
Nick, Mel, Terri, and Laura consume copious amounts of alcohol during their discussion about the nature of love, and their increasing intoxication mirrors their growing confusion about love and inability to define it. The friends have gathered to talk and drink gin, and the pouring, stirring, and sipping of drinks punctuates their conversation. As the friends get drunk, their conversation grows blurry and incoherent and finally stops completely. Drinking also serves as a kind of ritual in the story as the friends pass the bottle of gin around the table and make toasts to love. At the end of the story, as the friends discuss going out to dinner, Mel says they must finish the gin first, as though only finishing the bottle can free them from the discussion.
Symbols
The Sun
The sun in the story, which is bright at the beginning and gone by the end, represents the loss of clarity and happiness as the friends grow increasingly confused about the meaning of love. At the beginning of the story, Nick notes that the kitchen is bright and compares the friends to giddy children who have “agreed on something forbidden.” The talk is light and hopeful, just a friendly conversation on a gin-soaked afternoon. However, as the conversation about love becomes increasingly dark and complex, the sun in the kitchen slips slowly away. Nick notes that the sun is “changing, getting thinner,” and, not long after, that the sun is “draining out of the room.” As the sun disappears completely, the conversation devolves into Mel’s drunken threats against his ex-wife, including a fantasy of murdering her. At the end of the story, the friends are sitting in complete darkness. The sun has gone, as have their rosy, hopeful perceptions of love.
Classic Short stories online:
http://www.classicshorts.com/author.html\
http://www.classicreader.com/browse/6/p/title/
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/writers-as-architects/?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FCarver%2C%20Raymond&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=collection&_r=0
Raymond Carver:
The dirty-realism school of writing became popular in the 1980s thanks to a group of writers who began writing about middle-class characters who faced disappointments, heartbreaks, and harsh truths in their ordinary lives. Granta, a highly regarded literary journal, coined the term dirty realism in 1983 when it published its eighth issue, which featured writers from this school. Granta 8, as the issue became known, included stories by Angela Carter, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, and many others. Although each of these dirty-realism writers has a distinctive style, they are connected by their sparse prose, simple language with few adjectives or adverbs and direct descriptions of ordinary people and events. Much of the fiction published in the New Yorker, where many of these writers were and are still published, is of the dirty-realism school, but today the term—as well as the practice—has somewhat fallen out of fashion. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” was published in 1981, at the height of the dirty-realism movement, and the story is often regarded as the prime example of the form.
Critics have aligned Carver with minimalist writers because of his truncated prose and elliptical delineation of characters and events in the volume What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, in which Esquire magazine claimed that Carver had “reinvented the short story.” The stories of this collection, which reach extremes of stark understatement, have been called spare and knowing masterpieces by some reviewers and laconic, empty failures by others. Specifically, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” has been described by some commentators as a story where nothing really happens, but others see it as a demonstration of the barely-furnished nature of Carver's distinctive style. Most critics laud the impact and power of the stories in the collection, including “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.” Scholars have praised the realistic and evocative dialogue of the couples in the story as well as Carver's use of irony. Critically and popularly, Carver is acknowledged as a profound influence on contemporary writers and literature, and stories such as “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” are considered valuable, original contributions to the American short fiction genre.
Themes
The Elusive Nature of Love
The nature of love remains elusive throughout “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” despite the characters’ best efforts to define it. Mel tries again and again to pinpoint the meaning of love, but his examples never build up to any coherent conclusion. For example, he tells his friends about an elderly couple who nearly died in a car crash, but the conclusion of the story—the old man depressed by not being able to see his wife—merely confuses everyone. When he asserts that he’ll tell everyone exactly what love is, he instead digresses into a muddled meditation about how strange it is that he and the others have loved more than one person. His attempts to clarify the nature of love eventually devolve into a bitter tirade against his ex-wife. He seems much more certain about what love is not and tells Terri several times that if abusive love is true love, then she “can have it.”
Laura and Nick believe that they know what love is, but they never really provide a clear definition or explain why they’re so certain in their convictions. They merely demonstrate their love for each other by blushing and holding hands, but these actions simply support the mystery of love rather than unmask it. Terri, of all the friends, seems to be most certain about the meaning of love and repeatedly claims that her abusive ex-boyfriend, Ed, truly loved her, despite his crazy way of showing it. The examples she provides of this love—beating, stalking, and threatening—are disturbing but serve as proof in her mind. Like the others, however, she cannot translate her certainty into any kind of clear explanation of the nature of love.
The Inadequacy of Language
Although the four friends talk for a while about love, the fact that they never manage to define it suggests that language can’t adequately describe emotional, abstract subjects. Mel does the most talking, but his bloated stories and rambling digressions show that he has trouble conveying his thoughts and feelings, despite how much he talks. Terri speaks a great deal about her former lover Ed, but when Mel challenges her, she turns to intuition to prove her point. She believes that Ed loved her no matter what Mel or the others think, demonstrating that gut feelings about love can be more powerful and accurate than words. Laura and Nick, meanwhile, say very little about the nature of love and instead rely on physical gestures to clarify what language cannot: they hold hands, blush, and touch each other’s legs. Carver indicates that words simply aren’t enough when talking about love, which is probably why all four friends have fallen silent by the end of the story.
Motifs
Drinking
Nick, Mel, Terri, and Laura consume copious amounts of alcohol during their discussion about the nature of love, and their increasing intoxication mirrors their growing confusion about love and inability to define it. The friends have gathered to talk and drink gin, and the pouring, stirring, and sipping of drinks punctuates their conversation. As the friends get drunk, their conversation grows blurry and incoherent and finally stops completely. Drinking also serves as a kind of ritual in the story as the friends pass the bottle of gin around the table and make toasts to love. At the end of the story, as the friends discuss going out to dinner, Mel says they must finish the gin first, as though only finishing the bottle can free them from the discussion.
Symbols
The Sun
The sun in the story, which is bright at the beginning and gone by the end, represents the loss of clarity and happiness as the friends grow increasingly confused about the meaning of love. At the beginning of the story, Nick notes that the kitchen is bright and compares the friends to giddy children who have “agreed on something forbidden.” The talk is light and hopeful, just a friendly conversation on a gin-soaked afternoon. However, as the conversation about love becomes increasingly dark and complex, the sun in the kitchen slips slowly away. Nick notes that the sun is “changing, getting thinner,” and, not long after, that the sun is “draining out of the room.” As the sun disappears completely, the conversation devolves into Mel’s drunken threats against his ex-wife, including a fantasy of murdering her. At the end of the story, the friends are sitting in complete darkness. The sun has gone, as have their rosy, hopeful perceptions of love.
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