11.11 WAM (In Case You're Stuck)

You'll notice the multi-genre nature of these invitations:

...Start a story in the present day. A land-line telephone rings in an old house. Let the phone ring. And ring. While it's ringing, write a story in flashback from the perspective of the character who is ignoring the phone.

...Write 25 lines of unrhymed verse about the Birmingham Zoo.

...Write an essay about the cultural significance, as you understand/experience it, of the McDonalds french fry.

Stretch-Run Syllabus

Conference Drafts
Each of you will submit one more conference draft between now and Apr 24. The due dates are in the righthand column. They are also here:

· Mar 27: Julia / Antoinette / Hannah..........Conference → Apr 3
· Apr 3: Natalie / Olivia / Ceri-Lune..........Conference → Apr 10
· Apr 10: Carmen / Jessica / Lita..........Conference → Apr 17
· Apr 17: Lily / Lauren / Laura..........Conference → Apr 24
· Apr 24: Imani / Sarah / Jasmine..........Conference → May 1

Jury Portfolio
Your jury will consist of one revised and fully polished story. This must be one of the two stories you submitted for conference. I’ll give you a handout that explains how I’ll evaluate juries.

Weekly Schedule
In general, Mon-Wed-Fri will be focused on writing. We’ll start those days with a five-minute “Flash-or-Flush” prompt. That will be followed by a 45-minute stretch of uninterrupted writing. Instead of saving that work and submitting it at the end of the week, I’ll check your word count each writing period. The requirement is that you write for the full 45 minutes. The goal is to get to 500 words (11.11 words per minute!). As long as you’re writing the whole time, you don’t have to worry about whether you get to 500 words or not. On the other hand, if you get there in under 45 minutes, keep going. The most important thing is the uninterrupted time you spend writing, not the word count.

Tue-Thu will be focused on reading and elements of craft. Tuesdays we’ll read an exemplary short story together aloud and discuss it. On Thursdays we’ll also read: this time a novel the whole class will be reading together.

Readings
Senior Readings are starting up this Friday. The schedule is in the righthand column and here:

· Mar 27: Rachele Hatter and Persephonae Velasquez
· Apr 10: Elaine Crutchley and Hannah Irvin
· Apr 17: Michael Lambert and Erika Wade

All senior readings start at 7:00 p.m. Attendance is required. Absences must be prearranged or excused.

Your grade-level readings are also coming up. Practices will begin the week prior to your reading.

· Apr 2 (Thu): 9th Grade Reading
· Apr 15 (Wed): 8th Grade Reading
· Apr 28 (Tue): 7th Grade Reading

All grade-level readings start at 3:15 p.m. Attendance is required. Absences must be prearranged or excused.

"Book Reports"

As a refresher, here's what I'm looking for in these "book reports":

You're basically telling a roomful of your writer friends about this cool (awful?) book you just read. You DON'T have to summarize the entire plot. Just give the ground situation in a sentence or three, maybe read a short passage (no more than a medium-sized paragraph) to give us a sense of the voice, and tell us what this book has "taught" you about writing. Put this last part in the context of the Elements of Fiction we've talked about in class.

The End.

Prompts #19 & #20

In the spirit of the day -- when frugality is prized and the mantra of "reduce, reuse, recycle" has a kind of vocational intensity associated with it -- click here to find the DOZENS of writing prompts we've already encountered. All in one place. It's just like a mini-mall!

The Elements of Fiction

Intention: On some level, we all finish reading a story and ask ourselves -- and the author -- "So what?" Good stories leave you feeling like you can answer that question, like you know why you just read them. Sometimes there's a specific, tangible reason and you can summarize it in a sentence or two. My favorite stories tend to be those that leave me with just an intuitive sense of why I read them. I "feel" why they're important. And they seem to be about a lot of things while maintaining a certain simplicity and accessibility.

Details: In a way, this is the starting point. No matter what, great stories (great writing of all kinds) appeal to the five senses. The absolute best way to do that, hands down, is to use a predominance of interesting nouns and verbs. Adjectives and adverbs tend to be abstract (difficult to touch and taste and hear and smell and see), while nouns and verbs are concrete. You access them through and with your body.

Character: Characters change. At the very least, they have the clear opportunity to change and, for whatever reason, turn it down. Either way, this change (or lost opportunity for change) leads to real consequences for the character, positive and/or negative.

Setting: Setting is sneaky. It's really a support mechanism for two of the other elements, Details and Character. Knowing where in the world the story takes place -- and rendering it in an interesting way -- does more than half of the work in creating believable characters and giving a reader lush sensory details. When you forget your setting, you forget to ground -- literally and figuratively -- your story.

Beginning: All stories start somewhere. Most good ones, in my experience, start with a vibrant sensory image, a compelling action, and they leave me with an open-ended question. Beginnings are supposed to spur you to keep reading, and the combination of those three things (image + action + open question) will almost always do just that.

Ending: And all stories end. Or at least all stories stop. Stories that truly end -- and end well -- have the quality of resonance. When a sound resonates, it echoes for a while after the note has been struck. Think of a bell. There's the initial ding and then there's the sound that issues forth. Sometimes that sound can last a long time after the ding. It's sort of the same with the end of a story. The story comes to a close -- the "ding" -- but a good story lingers with a reader long after she's put it down. Often it helps you to make new connections to other elements of the story, and if you're really lucky as a reader, it helps you make new connections to what it means to be human.

Plot/Organization: All good stories are well-organized and most good stories have some sort of plot. Plot means that every cause has an effect. Somebody does something and that causes another thing to happen. Which causes another thing to happen, and so on. Stories are well-plotted when those causal sequences lead to a significant change in the essential elements of the story. Usually that change occurs in the main character.

Voice: Voice is the most difficult to define element. It's also arguably the most important one, especially if you're going to follow Tenet #4: Make it interesting. Voice is about the idiosyncratic choices you make as a writer. The vocabulary and sentence structures you use. The details you choose to describe. The characters you choose to populate the story and the aspects of them you choose to focus on. Also your thematic preoccupations and obsessions. It is, by definition, subjective. It is how you get "you" on the page.

Weekly Warm-Up: ASFA Gallery

Browse the gallery and pick a piece of art to use as a spark.