Summer Reading and Reception

                                             

 

CWI’s Summer Reading and Reception

Families and friends of our CWI writers are invited to attend our Summer Reading and hear the poems, prose, and dramatic writing that our talented young writers have been working on this summer! We will also present our 2012 edition of The Purchase Review, which will be available for free through Lulu.com.

Friday, August 3rd

1:30-3:30 Reading and Reception

Natural Sciences Building

First Floor, Room 1001 (Lecture Hall)

 

 

We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Monday, 7/30: Revisons!

This week we will finish, workshop, and revise the pieces for the lit mag and for the reading. There will an extra workshop so that everyone has ample opportunity to receive feedback. I encourage you to send you work to me, Anna, and/or Linnea, to get our feedback.

For the reading:
Each person will have about five minutes to read. This will be 4-5 pages double-spaced. You may choose anything that you wrote or worked on this summer: prose, poetry, drama (one-acts and monologues). Also note that you can read a combination, for example: a poem, a piece of flash fiction, and an excerpt from a novella.

For the lit mag:
2-5 pieces. If you are submitting poetry and/or flash fiction, I would like you to put in more pieces. If you are submitting all or mostly prose, it's fine to put in fewer.
Author's Bio: please write up a little blurb about yourself. Here are some examples. My personal favorite in #20.  Here are some more examples. If you scroll down, you will see a "tag line" and an "extensive bio." You can do either. I would like you to limit the amount of specific information (geography, school name, etc.) and speak in more general terms.

Afternoon:

Read-Around:

Mini-workshop
Daniel, Samuel, Megha, Lina

Friday

Write: Monologues, one-acts, and other work
Read-around

Lunch

Workshop: Sarah, Samantha, Samuel, Jake, Rose, Katie

Kraken

As per our discussion yesterday, this is the Kraken (thanks, Daniel!). Lamprey eel-ish, I'd say. Also, gross.

Thursday, 7/26: One-Act Plays

 "I wrote all the time. Everywhere. When I wasn't writing, I was thinking about it or continuing to 'write' in my head. . . . I wasn't very good company. At that time, a major critic commented that I wrote 'disposable plays,' and in some sense he was probably right. But nothing mattered to me then except to get the stuff down on paper. . . . There was never a sense, in all this, of evolving a style or moving on to a bigger, longer, 'more important' form. Each play had a distinct life of its own and seemed totally self-contained within its one-act structure."

-- Sam Shepard

Morning:
Today and tomorrow, we're going to be writing ten-minute plays or one-act plays.

•  A good ten-minute play is not a sketch or an extended gag, but rather a complete, compact play, with a beginning, middle and end. It typically takes place in one scene and runs no more than ten pages. (source)
• One-acts can run anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour or more...Arguably the most popular length for one-acts is around a half-hour. (source) 

One-act play: Is It Me?
Excerpt from (Three-Act) The Importance of Being Earnest


Afternoon:
Workshop
Daniel, Jack, Mick, Megha, Paige

Wednesday, 7/25: Form

• Finish Breakaway poems
• Writing period
• Sonnets
• Shakespeare's sonnet 118

Prompt:

• Write a "Dear John" letter in the form of a sonnet
• Write a love poem in one of the above forms
• Write a rant in the form of a sonnet

Game: Limericks

Breakaway Poems (Group)

Introduce prose poetry:

"Though the name of the form may appear to be a contradiction [sort of, look at the links], the prose poem essentially appears as prose, but reads like poetry. In the first issue of The Prose Poem: An International Journal, editor Peter Johnson explained, 'Just as black humor straddles the fine line between comedy and tragedy, so the prose poem plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels.'" poets.org

Poems Referenced:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22136#
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20957#
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15306
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15578

As a class: brainstorm and select 3 words that will appear in all sections of all poems
As a group: decide who will write in what style (prose, rhyming quatrains, non- rhyming couplets with emjambment)
Each person will write a segment of the wole poem. The speakers will be distinguished by style, but also by content, which will be determined by the group. Examples are: different speakers at the same event; different timeframes or eras; three places at the same time, talking about the same thing or event.

Tuesday 7/24: Style, Showing and Telling

• Postcard poems "Nantucket"
• Whimsical meditations "The Naming of Cats"
• Showing vs. Telling in poetry (Neruda vs. Eliot)
• line breaks, enjambment

Prompts
1.  write a poem that plays with line breaks and enjambment
2. write a poem in the style of William Carlos William's "Nantucket" that describes the physical aspect of someone you love. 
3. write a poem in the style of Neruda's "Tonight I Can Write" (tells). Re-write in the style of the Stevie Smith poem (shows).

Afternoon:
Sonnets

Monday, 7/23: Intro to Poetry

"The more thought that is turned into poetry the better; only it must be, in the final form, *felt* thought" --T.S. Eliot

What is poetry?

stanza
line
line breaks
heroic poem
personification
alliteration
assonance

Prompts
1. Poem referenced: "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carrol. Write a poem in the heroic style. Your poem can be about anything from the mundane to the epic. Please use four-line stanzas with an ABAB or AABB rhyme scheme.

2. Poem referenced: "Why I Never Keep a Gun in the House" by Billy Collins. Content: something minor (like Collins' barking dog). Try for a humorous or sardonic tone. You may use assonance but try not to rhyme.

Group
List poems. Prompt: "I'll never...I'll always..."
"I'm so [emotion] I could [example]..."

Friday, 7/20: Spinning Tales and Yarns

Invent a tale of a fictional folk hero. Use a conversational tone. Here is an example, "Babe the Blue Ox." Here's another: "The Birth of Paul Bunyan."

Make up a fairy tale. Fairy tales tell a lot of story in a little space (lots of story, not a lot of character development, sensory description). Here is a link to some common elements of fairy tales.

Workshop: Megha, Samantha, Paige, Jack, Samuel

Thursday, 7/19: Style

"Good writing is like a windowpane." --George Orwell

• Diction: Word choice, sentence structure.
• Pace: sentence length, grammar.

Exercise

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters." From Pride and Prejudice

"I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window." --Alice Munroe

Workshop II
Sarah, Katie, Samuel, Mick, Jake, Rose

Weds, 7/17: Unreliable Narrators

• What is an unreliable narrator?
• Example: "Memento Mori" by Jonathan Nolan.

Prompt: Write a short story from using multi-narrator third person perspective. One narrator should be unreliable, and the other should be reliable. An epistolary format would work nicely for this.  

• Afternoon: Share Said and Unsaid pieces from yesterday and Monday's First Line, Last Line pieces.

Tuesday, 7/17: Dialogue

"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Elements of Craft: Dialogue
• tight, economical
• reveals character, advances plot
• "natural"
• Dialogue Tags/Adverbs

1. Write a brief exchange using colorful adverbs as dialogue tags. Now re-write to use simple tags such as said and asked, and relying on shows and context for the emotional charge of the speech. Compare the effects of the two.
2. Write a dialogue with two very different voices (at least one should be very different from your own).

Prompts:
1. Write a short story or piece of flash fiction that contains only one line of dialogue. The rest should be narrative.

2. Write a short story or piece of flash fiction in which only one character can speak. The other character should communicate nonverbally.

3. Write a short story or piece of flash fiction taking swears into consideration. Your characters can swear all the time or very little. Think about what this indicates about their personalities and states of mind. Swears can be powerful words through judicious use, or they can be a feature of a character's speech. Think of the effect they have in terms of expositon of plot/character.

4. Write a personal essay that starts like this: "I will never say..."

Said and Unsaid
 Read "The Waltz" by Dorothy Parker. Discussion and prompt.

Dialogue and Unreliable Narrators (7/17/12)

An unreliable narrator is one whose recounting of the story has questionable accuracy. A narrator can be unreliable for many reasons: addiction, denial about their realities, intellectual disabilities, or they may simply be characters who were created to be liars. One novel that employs an unreliable narrator is Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time." An example of a movie with an unreliable narrator would be "Forrest Gump." If you get a chance, take a look at the script. Why is Forrest an unreliable narrator? How does his dialogue help perpetuate that identity? Is it still possible to distinguish his unique speech from others simply by reading the written dialogue?

Your answers may surprise you. You can read the script here: http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Forrest-Gump.html

A good example of a short story that uses dialogue to forward the plot and flesh out the characters is Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." A good exercise to strengthen your skills at dialogue is to try and use it as Hemingway does, not simply to inform the reader by letting important information be exchanged to another character, or to decorate the piece with witticisms, but to really add another dimension to the story. Also, listening to people speak and really being attuned to how they interact is always helpful in making your written dialogue sound more natural.

Also, if you're looking to read a novel with very strong and powerful dialogue, Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" is not only brilliantly crafted, but it also happens to be my favorite book of all time.

Monday, 7/16: The Hero's Journey

“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.” --Joseph Campbell

"Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”  --Joseph Campbell

• Discussion and explanation of the Hero's Journey
• Static vs. Dynamic Characters
• Flaws/Fatal Flaw
• Prompt: Plot the major points of a novel according to the Hero's Journey
• Prompt: Write the opening chapter of your novel.

Exercise to develop your Hero/Heroine
1. Describe the clothes your hero/ine wears and their appearance in general. What is his or her attitude toward their appearance and clothing?
2. What would your hero/ine least like to do/be/have?
3. What would your hero/ine most like to do/be/have?
4. Get a feel for how your protagonist thinks and speaks. Write a letter or email from your hero/ine to his or her best friend.
5. What is your hero/ine's major strengths and weakness (flaw)? What are the minor ones?

Related Links

Hero's journey (for novels). The Hero's Journey is the classic format of adventure stories.

• Summary of steps of the Hero's Journey
• Visual of the Hero's Journey
• Archetypal Characters

Friday, July 13: Perspective, Workshop II

If there's a book [or story] you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.  ~Toni Morrison

Elements of Craft: Perspective

First, Second, and Third
Variations on Perspectives

• first person
• first person multiple vision
• first person peripheral
• Unreliable first person
• second person
• third person single vision
• third person multiple vision
• third person omniscient
• third person objective (reporting style)

Game: In pairs, decide on a scene and characters together. Now tell the story from two different perspectives. Be ready to read it aloud to the group.

Prompt: Write a directive piece modelling Jamaica Kinkaid's flash fiction, "Girl." The piece should use second person perspective and should answer a question. Kinkaid's piece answers the question, "How to be a lady." Your piece can be anything, "How to be a man", "How to Make Friends", "How to [        ]." Try to use her techniques: listing, concrete images, second person, and dialogue.

Workshop II
Sarah, Katie, Samuel, Mick, Jake, Rose

Thursday, 7/12: Structure and Plot, Workshop I

Elements of Craft: Structure and Plot.

• In media res
• Bookending
• Major dramatic question
• What is in the story should progress the plot, develop character, or both.
• Protagonist, Goal (concrete goal often embody abstract goals), Conflict (internal and external)
• Plot and character are almost inseparable
• Plot vs. Subplots: Plot is the story of the protagonist. Subplots (in novellas and novels) concern the secondary characters, but are relevant to the main arc. Subplot can complement the main plot either by echoing it in some way(s) or by contrasting with it.
• Turning true stories into storytelling
• How plot emerges
• Hero's journey (for novels). The Hero's Journey is the classic format of adventure stories.
• Summary of steps of the Hero's Journey
• Visual of the Hero's Journey

Prompt A: Write a story that starts and ends with the opening or closing of doors.

Prompt B: Write an instructional that also tells a story.  

Workshop (afternoon): Daniel, Lina, Megha, Samantha, Paige, Jack

Wednesday, July 11- Character

Today we're going to play a bit of a "Who's Who" game to help sharpen our skills for writing character sketches. Each student is going to select one well-known figure and write a detailed sketch of that character. The papers will be shuffled, and the other students will have to guess which character was being described. The more effective the description, the easier it will be to determine the subject of the writing. Characters can be anyone from historical figures to cartoon characters, as long as they are easily recognizable figures. (For example: Charlie Sheen, The Cat in the Hat, Spongebob, Judge Judy... anyone with clear defining characteristics.)

Weds, 7/11: Character

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature." --Earnest Hemingway

What would there be in a story of happiness?  Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.  ~André Gide
 

• Characters are motivated by desire. An important question to keep in mind as you write is "What does my character want?" 
• Character is revealed through ACTION, THOUGHT, SPEECH, and APPEARANCE. 
• Stereotypes
• Primary, Secondary, Tertiary characters
• Excerpts from Junger, Irving.

Example of physical description:
 The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield. -From "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving

Prompt:
Write a story about a character who wants something. It could be something as simple as a cup of coffee or to use the restroom, or it could be more complex, like taking over the world-- it's the desire itself that's important. The character should be realistic rather than stereotypical (remember the things that add to realistic characters are desires, contradictions, and flaws). At the end, you should have answered whether or not they get it at the end (yes, no, maybe). 

Links:
Double Indemnity (anti-hero, film noir)

Email Us for Feedback

If you have a piece for which you want feedback, you can email it to theresa.benaquist@gmail.com or annapicagli@gmail.com.

Tuesday, 7/10: Show Vs. Tell

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.  ~Anton Chekhov

Elements of Craft: Showing vs. Telling
Place (excerpts from Sebastain Junger's A Perfect Storm)
Character (excerpt from Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely)

Prompt:
Write a piece of flash fiction (less than 1000 words) short story (1000-7000 words) or scene in which you describe the character/s using a key physical feature (like the Chandler reading). They should either contrast or meld with their surroundings (try the techniques of Junger for description of place). The story should have little or no dialogue. Junger uses embedded dialogue (speeches without the use of quotation marks), feel free to try this to see the effect.

Here's a link to word counts for different writing projects.