Day: August 28, 2020

Our book identifies these four as sources of imaginative writing. Go to the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Links to an external site.) and choose one of the pictures listed below. Write four opening lines for a story based on that picture. Each line must capture one of the sources. For example, for Girl with a Pearl Earring (Links to an external site.) by Johannes Vermeer:

Dream: I will wear this on my wedding day.
Risk: Perhaps my mistress will never miss this; she has so much jewelry.
Mystery: No one would ever guess that the key to the whole puzzle lies in this earring.
Play: The last time I wore this, I had an adventure I will never forget!
Here are the pictures (you can search the site by typing in the title of the picture).

The Organ Rehearsal by Henry Lerolle
Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Lucas Cranach the Elder
The Stolen Kiss by Jean Honore Fragonard
The Happy Mother by Jean Honore Fragonard
A Dance in the Country by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
Tea by James Tiss

Journal 3 – Experiment with Genres

Choose one of the opening lines you wrote in the above exercise and write a continuation in three genres: the start of a story, a few lines of a poem, a piece of creative non-fiction. Don’t worry if you don’t complete these. The idea is to experiment with different genres, to help you choose the genre you want to write in for your major creative work during the rest of the course.

In Modules 1 and 2, you practiced reviewing the writing of professional authors in your writing workshops. Those workshops were designed to help you recognize how authors use various elements of creative writing in their work, as well as practice giving feedback.

In this module, the whole class will practice together, in a large workshop. You will give the kind of feedback that you will be required to provide when you review the first and second drafts of your workshop peers’ creative expressions.

Read this first draft of a short story: Kathleen Approaches a Cookie
1.Consult the rubric to help you think about what to say in your feedback.
2.Compose one or two paragraphs of feedback and post them to this discussion.

Although certain plots or characters seem to demand certain settings, it can be fun to deviate from the expected. This exercise allows you to play with blind choices and figure out how to make them work.

Preparation: Choose four numbers (from 1 to 10). Each number corresponds to an item on the Mix and Match Lists.Preview the document The numbers don’t have to be different (for example, you could pick all 4’s if you wanted to). The first number is the character your story will focus on, the second number is the setting, and so forth.

Exercise: Write one or two paragraphs in which you introduce your character, setting, time and situation/challenge. You do not have to solve the problem; just describe it. For example, suppose you chose a high school teacher, a car wash, during a snowstorm, who has just witnessed a robbery. Your paragraph could be something like this:

John didn’t know why he decided to go to the car wash in the middle of a snowstorm. Maybe he was just frustrated with trying to grade his sophomore’s essays on the Constitution and decided that some fresh, if frigid, air would clear his head and improve his disposition. He never imagined that he would emerge from the blast of dry air at the exit of the concrete cave just in time to see a man knock a woman into a pile of slush and grab her purse. The man was on foot; John was in his newly washed car with the motor running. He didn’t hesitate.

Setting can have a great influence on the characters and plot of a story. For example, in the TV show Hawaii 5-0, the island acts as a limiter, a finite area in which plot events can take place. And the island also influences how the characters behave.

Post an example of a TV show or movie or book in which the setting is a strong influence. Explain how the story (plot and/or characters) would have to be very differentor perhaps could not be told at allif the setting were changed.

Choose one of the bumper stickers listed below and do the following exercise. Write in complete sentences.

Bumper Stickers:

-My other car is a horse

-My dog can eat your honor student

-No Frackin’ Way

-Reduce Reuse Recycle

-All You Need Is Love

-My grandson is in the Air Force

Exercise:

Describe the vehicle the sticker is on: make, model, year, color, condition
Open the door: Describe the textures and smell of the interior. Name three objects you find. Name a fourth one you are surprised to find.
Here comes the owner: Describe him or her. How he/she is walking; what he/she is wearing; what he/she is carrying. The owner says something (not necessarily to you); what is it?

ENGL355 Rubric for Bumper Sticker

This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeVehicle description (make, model, year, condition)
20.0 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeInterior description (textures, smell)
20.0 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeObject identification (name three and a fourth that surprises you)
10.0 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeOwner description (how he/she is walking; what he/she is wearing; what he/she is carrying)
30.0 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeWhat the owner says
10.0 pts
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeProper use of grammar, punctuation, paragraphing, sentence construction
10.0 pts

A writing workshop is described on pages 12 and 13 in your book. Review those pages again, paying special attention to the bullet list on page 13. These five bullets are the foundation and guiding principles of the writing workshops we will conduct in this class.

Everyone is expected to participate in the writing workshop, both as an author submitting work and as a reviewer exploring the submitted work. For the first three weeks, you will practice being reviewers, using pieces of writing by professional authors.

This week, you will read Annie Dillard’s “from Heaven and Earth in Jest” (pp. 28-29). Your workshop reviews should focus on how Dillard both shows and tells in this excerpt and why. Both showing and telling are necessary; the writer must decide when to use which strategy. Do you think Dillard uses either strategy too much?

Your purpose is to discuss what works for you in the piece of writing and what doesn’t work. It’s not enough to simply identify this, though; you must be able to explain your responses. This is a bit tricky. Because good writing is an art as well as a craft, the whole will always be more than the sum of its partswhich is to say that a piece of writing will almost never be fully unraveled and dissected to reveal all its secrets. However, writers are always interested in learning what they can!