PRESENTATION OUTLINE
Dates:
Four more critiques due today
Reading responses + Portfolios Due next week
Next Week:
Class Reading - prepare
2-4 pages to read (out loud!) to the class
+ potluck?
individual meeting sign up next week for April 6 or 13.
Liz Howard:
Group Discussion (handout)
+ Questions
Cut Up
This seems like a simple exercise, but it can actually be quite useful, particularly in terms of this digital context in which we are working.
Choose a story or poem that doesn't seem to be working, print a hard copy and cut it apart into the separate component parts of scenes and narrative passages. Lay these story pieces out on a large table and just take in what is in front of you. How many scenes or stanzas do you have? Are there too few or too many? Are there any "missing" scenes or stanzas? What would happen if you rearranged the sequence of events? What would happen if you begin with the beginning of the ending scene and use it to frame the story or poem?
By making the work physically tangible and allowing yourself to actually see the structure, ideas for the work as a whole can be generated. Both gaps and connections can become obvious.
Just Cut
In the process of revision, it's good to ask yourself the big question: what have I written? Think about what it is to you, what it means. Look for patterns in the work that you may not have even intended to produce, but exist anyway. What is crucial about this work? What is extraneous?
One way to figure out what is important in a work is to take a page of a story or a poem an cut it by 25%. What’s crucial? What can be let go?
Editing for Endings
One way to figure out how and where a piece of writing ends is to write a word or line or a sentence about what the writing means. Use that encapsulated version to inform the editing process. Another thing about endings, people tend to write past them.
Look at your endings to see if you're trying to over-explain. If endings are explanatory, ask if that fits with the tone of the rest of the writing. Give your readers space, something to work with, or puzzle over, leave readers thinking, or end it so they are directed back into the story. Often the endings are already there, you just need to find them.
So, this week, take a piece you've written and try to come up with one or two words that encapsulate the idea of the peice. Edit with those words in mind.
Or take a short story and write a sentence that invokes the meaning (however you conceive of that) and edit with that sentence in mind. See what happens. You may decide the original version works better, or you might discover the ending is not end.
Write a new opening for one of your pieces
Write a new ending for your pieces.
label showing versus telling
label abstract and concrete
Homolinguistic Translation
Try this exercise from the poet Charles Bernstein:
Homolinguistic translation: Take a poem (someone else's, then your own) and translate it "English to English" by substituting word for word, phrase for phrase, line for line, or "free" translation as response to each phrase or sentence.
Or translate the poem into another literary style or a different diction, for example into a slang or vernacular. Do several different types of homolinguistic translation of a single source poem.
Chaining: try this with a group, sending the poem on for "translation" from person to another until you get back to the first author.
Alternately, experiment with incorporating other languages into your work.
You could also try "translating" from one genre to another. So translate a short story into a poem or a poem into a short story. What does the process of translation tell you about the original version?
