This is the page for: Creative Writing 2, Fall 2010

(Course-related content will appear here in reverse chronological order: the newest things at the top of the page, and older posts toward the bottom.)

For Our Last Few Classes…

Folks,

To clarify, on the evening of Dec. 9th we’ll be discussing the following stories from David Sedaris’ When You Are Engulfed In Flames (2008):

On the 14th December, I’ll bring a “treat” to class, and I plan on reading a story to you, probably Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Professor’s Teddy Bear” (1948), and that will be the end of our semester. (I have an alternate possible plan, but I will run it by you.)

FINAL WRITING SUBMISSION DEADLINE

To recap, your final writing submission deadline is noon on the 21st of December, 2010. You must submit your final writing project, along with any revised exercises you’d like me to see (and it’s a good idea to include the original version, so I can see what changes you’ve made).

As I mentioned in my last post (see below) you should submit this all with an SASE if you would like comments and written feedback on your work.  Make sure there is adequate postage for your work, plus a page or two extra (because my written feedback  will likely include a couple of pages of paper).

SINCE YOU ASKED

Some of you asked about the work of HP Lovecraft (the horror/fantasy/SF author) last time. A number of his stories are available online. Although the graphics are cheesy, this page claims to have his complete works. Another, less-cheesy source for a lot of his work is Manybooks.net, where you can download a lot of different formats, including ones compatible with your smartphones: the Manybooks.net Lovecraft page is here.

Among my personal favorites of his works are:

Actually a couple of stories I love more simply aren’t at Manybooks.net. However, these are all good ones. If you’re interested but prefer to read in Korean, a large number of Lovecraft’s stuff is available in Korean translation as well.

Bear in mind, I warned you: Lovecraft’s work shows signs of his racism and sexism (and general personal weirdness), but it has endured as important to the genres of horror, SF, and fantasy alike.

Final Portfolio Deadline

As we agreed in class, your final portfolio deadline is noon on the 21st of December 2010. You will hand in your  final writing project; optionally, you can add any revisions that you have done to writing submitted earlier.   Like usual, you can submit the writing to my mailbox in the office of the School of English, which is IH341.

As with all the writing classes I teach, I am happy to write feedback for your final project. However, I want to make sure you really want the feedback–writing that stuff takes a lot of time and effort! Therefore, I’m going to ask you to submit your work in an unsealed SASE. An SASE is a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope.

Basically, all you need to do is take your writing, and put it in an big brown envelope. Next, write two addresses on the envelope. Before you write the addresses, you should know: I will be sending the work BACK TO YOU in the envelope. Therefore, you should write your own address as the “recipient” address, and you should write the address for the office of the School of English as the “sender” address.

(You can find the university’s address on the class website. Of course, you should include my name as the sender, and the room of our department office, IH341.)

If you do include an SASE, I’ll include some line edits along with general comments written about your work (like the typewritten comments I gave you on your midterm project).

If you don’t submit your work in an SASE, I will simply assign a grade and leave the work at the office. You can pick it up if you like, but if not it will be destroyed in February.

Stuff

Alright, so for next class, remember: you are to prepare 5 minutes of your own writing for practicing reading to an audience. I’ll give some tips and pointers afterward.

Also, I saw a video on TED.com that I thought might inspire you about writing stories that differ from our everyday assumptions about the world. The video is here:

Writing Exercises

I gave you a couple of exercises in the last few weeks. I was asked to post them here, to make sure the instructions were clear, but since I explained them in class, I am going to have to try remember them exactly. (Sometimes variations on exercises are possible, so I’m trying to remember exactly which version I gave you.)

1. Tense, Isn’t It? (Due 11 Nov. 2010): Take an innocuous scene, and fill it with tension. That is, take any scene in which you’ve observed people doing something–sitting side by side on a park bench, or chatting in a car while they go to the supermarket–and use description word choice, rhythms, and so on to fill the scene with tension. The reader doesn’t need to be able to guess what is wrong, but it should be clear to an attentive reader that something indeed is wrong.

Ooops, this exercise above was due 4 Nov. 2010, and titled something else. Scroll down to see the original. The dates are wrong below, also, but I’ll leave it as it is since you have a lot of exercises to do these days.

2. The Narrator (Due 18 Nov. 2010): Create a narrator persona with a very distinct and noticeable voice. Think of the example I read to you from Adrienne Kress’ novel Timothy and the Dragon’s Gate.   The voice of the character should be clear, should tell us things about how the character sees himself or herself, but should also hint at how the character is mistaken, deluded, or wrong about himself or herself.

3. A Crash Course in Dialog (Due 25 Nov. 2010): This is the complicated exercise I mentioned in class on 4 Nov. 2010. Essentially, here’s how it works:

A. Read a few dialogs from short stories or novels originally written in English, and find one that you like and feel is natural in its flow. Then do up a “schematic” of the dialog, preserving the end punctuation and quotation marks, but turning everything else into markers for types of content. For example:

“What are you doing?” Mary screamed. The car was coming towards them quickly.

Tim didn’t have to think twice. “Jump!” he shouted, as he grabbed her hand.

“That’s crazy,” Mary mumbled. “We’ll never get out of…”

“Just trust me.”

The car was getting louder.

Finally, Mary smiled. “Well, today’s a good day to die.”

“Shut up, baby. We’ll be fine,” Tim said. And then they jumped.

becomes:

“____?” CHAR. ACTION.

ACTION. “______!” CHAR, ACTION.

“_______,” CHAR. “_____________…”

“_________.”

DESCRIPTION.

ACTION. “__________.”

“_______________,” CHAR. ACTION.

B. Choose a dialog from an English-language film you have watched before, a dialog you found interesting and memorable. Transcribe the dialog from memory, watching the scene as many times as necessary. (But transcribe from memory, not by listening to the scene over and over.) For a movie with the above dialog, you would get:

MARY: What are you doing?

TIM: Jump!

MARY: That’s crazy. We’ll never get out of…

TIM: Just trust me.

MARY: Well, today’s a good day to die.

TIM: Shut up, baby. We’ll be fine.

C. Turn this script into a dialog like you’d see in a novel or short story. Choose which actions from the movie scene are important enough to use in your written dialog, and leave out the rest. For formatting your dialog and knowing where to put in action or description, try using some of the structures that you created in your schematic, or experiment with other structures if you like.

D. Hand in the following:

Deadlines And So On

Today we had some deadline changes, so here they are:

  1. The deadline for written critiques of Seungchul’s and Minkyung’s stories is now 6pm on 27 October 2010. You will upload the critiques to the correct folders here so that Minkyung and Seungchul can read them prior to class on 28 October.
  2. We will have “critical discussions” (not exactly critiques) of the two stories in class on 28 October.
  3. The deadline for submitting your midterm writing submission to me is 12pm (noon) on 1 November 2010.
  4. You have a writing exercise due on 4 November, to be handed in during class. (See below.)

Exercise: Show Me The Tension!

For 4 November, your writing assignment is to take a scene involving at least two people interacting, and write it up. The scene you write should be based on a real interaction you have witnessed in the past week or two. It may involve you or people you know, but could instead involve strangers. (This is completely up to you, but if it involves people you know, please change the names.) Your job is to take a very innocuous scene —  a scene that doesn’t have any necessarily overt tension or problem — and plant the seeds of a possible or forthcoming problem or tension in the scene. For example, imagine the first scene in Frances’ story, except with a specific tension. (For example, imagine that Drei has just found out her ex-boyfriend is dating her old best friend; or imagine that Drei’s mother has just found out that Drei’s father, her ex-husband, is remarrying a young woman next weekend.) You should not directly mention the problem or tension, but it may be possible for the reader to guess, however vaguely, either that something is wrong, or even what might be wrong. (The reader needn’t be able to guess correctly: it’s more important that they sense that something is wrong, than for them to sense what exactly is wrong.)

This should be a single scene involving dialog, description, and perhaps direct narration or commentary by the character (if written from the first-person point of view). It should be approximately 500 words long, and is due at the beginning of class on 4 November.

Creative Writing Homework, 12 October

Hi everyone!

Your homework for today is:

  1. to access and review Seoyeon’s story, which is here.You will critique as per usual critique method (and upload a written critique for her) by next class.
  2. to carry out a review of opening sections of a number of pieces of writing in English (whether a pile of novels, or a few books of short stories). Take notes on them, and choose the most interesting or striking ones to analyze them. Ask yourself (and try to answer the question) why they are striking; who you meet in the opening paragraphs; what action is happening? What is being told, and implied, about the world, society,. family, culture, character, relationship, context, or whatever? What goes unsaid, but implied? What is stated explicitly? What expectations are set up in the opening, and how do you imagine they will, or will not, pay off?You will write up an analysis of three openings for me, submitting it on Tuesday, 19 October.

Homework?

Hey everyone,

I know I assigned you some homework during class on Sept. 28th, but neither I nor anyone who remained atv the end of class could remember what exactly it had been. However, after some coffee and some hard thinking, I’m pretty sure it had to do with one of the three following issues:

  1. Choosing a POV (Point of View) Character or Narrator
  2. Writing Characters Based on Your Friends
  3. Finding a Starting Point for a Story
  4. Style, Style, Style
  5. (NEW!) The Unspoken Thing

Therefore, I’m going to give you a choice of exercises. Choose one exercise — the one you think most addresses the problems you’re facing now — and complete it for next Thursday.

  1. Choosing a POV Character or Narrator: Try the “Who Does This Change Hurt Most?” exercise we did in class.  Try think deviously, as we did in class, in setting up your characters for serious suffering and difficulty. Write up an explanation of who the main characters are, and which one you think would be the most interesting main (or POV character).
  2. Writing Characters Based on Your Friends: Embrace the weirdness. Check out Rudy Rucker’s “Transrealist Manifesto” and write a scene from a real event that occurred in the past week. Feel free to use your friends, yourself, people you know or met, and change enough details and make it weird enough that nobody will see themselves in it.
  3. Finding a Starting Point for a Story: Try the exercise we did in class, when I asked you to write about how I picked up my pen and put it into my pocket. Remember how the look on my face, or speculations about my octopus ring, led to interesting story ideas? Observe people around you, and choose some action by some person you don’t know. Describe the action and use the action or details to create an interesting hook for the reader, but also to force yourself to take the story in a specific direction: the octopus ring is a sign of being a member of a cult; the shirt is wrinkled because the man is a drunk; the pen is actually stolen, and the man realizes it only after he puts it in his pocket.
  4. Style, Style, Style: For those of you struggling with whether you want to write in a more florid style or something plainer, one interesting experiment would be to try writing the same scene two different ways: very descriptively, with as beautiful language as you can; and then, once more, in a very plain style.
  5. (NEW!) The Unspoken Thing: This is an exercise in mastering the famous “Show, Don’t Tell” rule of creative writing, as discussed in class on 30 Sept. Basically, what you must do is write a scene in which two (or more, but two is usually enough) characters are interacting. The (usually) emotional (or intellectual?) core of their interaction is never explicitly mentioned. However, the scene carries strong implications of the unspoken emotional dimension of the interaction. For example, you might choose to have a father who is lying on his deathbed, his son visiting him. The father and son may talk about something — not the father’s illness, not their past quarrels — but the interaction is weighed down by the knowledge that the father will die soon, and the regret of not having gotten along. Or, for another example, a man and a woman are driving in a car. They have just decided something major about their relationship (to get married, to break up, to have a baby) but this does not get mentioned in whatever conversation or narration the reader sees. You can only imply that something is going on.

I also asked you guys to look up FRACTALS before next class. I’m talking about something like this.

UPDATE: Some people have had trouble getting at Minjae’s story. I hope that’s sorted out now…

By the Way…

While there is a much more important news flash below, I thought I’d post this now. If you want an excellent guide to formatting your writing for class critique and for submission as homework, go and see William Shunn’s guide to manuscript formatting. It’s short, but very good, as well as a perfect example in itself.

While I understand small, occasional errors are inevitable, work that is deemed inappropriately formatted will be deleted from submissions for critique, as well as being returned unread. Formatting is that important: it makes your work easy to read quickly, and clear enough to read after reading a lot of other text. It’s like the nice clothes you would put on before making a speech or presentation.

So go make sure you know how to do it!

Fill Out the POLL, folks!

If you scroll down (or follow this link), you’ll see a post with a link to a poll I’ve asked you to fill out.

It’s now the evening on FRIDAY, 24 September, and you’re supposed to be logging into Google Docs tomorrow to find the story that you will be critiquing for Tuesday. The only people who have filled out the poll are Seoyeon Kim and Moon Jungki (who filled it out twice).

If you don’t fill it out in the next 24 hours, I won’t be able to invite you to the Google Docs Folder Set for our class, and it will be your problem (and your grade will reflect that) when Tuesday arrives and you have no critique for Minjae… or, Minjae, when others have nothing to critique.

And let it be said that in future, I don’t like to have to remind students to do their work, especially not on a Friday night. (And I don’t want to have to update the website on weekends in general, thank you very much.)

Let’s be a little more organized, people!

A good talk about writing what you don’t know… and writing in a foreign language.

Often in Creative Writing classes, teachers will tell students, “Write what you know!” (I don’t think I said that to you, but I could easily have done so.) But Turkish author Elif Shafak has a different idea, one that makes a lot of sense to me and which I think could be useful to you, so I’m posting her lecture at TED.com for you.(She also has some good ideas about the process of writing in a foreign language and the act of reinventing yourself.)See her talk here. (And while there are not yet Korean subtitles, there are English subtitles available which will help you understand her despite her wonderful accent.)

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