You started class with a writing prompt where you were asked to describe a place and a person, to report about three lines of dialog, and to place this material within a mental state. The mental state was not an interpretive state (I was so happy; it was the most important experience in my life; etc) - rather it was to document the internal response (a buzzy feeling like too much coffee, a mind going out of focus, a feeling of almost like hunger except in my heart, etc) that won't necessarily correlate with the big labels we have for how we feel.
You spent about 2 minutes writing these. For your process, some of you started with a place where you'd had lots of experiences and listed some possibilities; some of you focused on a conversation that you could write to; and some of you found (through listing) an event with that had lots of feeling associated to it.
You read your work and I thought it was very strong. By standing back and watching - getting outside of your narrative - you opened up space for your readers to make a narrative that would draw them in. I liked how your stories raised questions, and drew me along to pose connections (which weren't already made for me by interpretive bridges in the writing). They were clearly written and richly evocative. And that is exactly what we are going for.
Examples of short CNF. After this exercise we spent some time talking about "The Indian Dog," a piece that uses narrative, characterization (of himself and the dog), and careful selection of language and metaphor to tell a larger story of what he learned about "the heart's longing." While Momaday gives us extensive illustration of how the reader learned this lesson, ultimately each reader is led to a place where s/he must construct his/her own story.
An invitation to use form as part of your story. The pieces in your text presented some different ways to use sections/space to create a short piece. The challenges are different than they are for a long piece, but the task is similar in that it is about using relationships between the sections in a way that contributes to the work's interpretation. It sounds like most of you aren't so interested in incorporating image, sound, and/or motion, so we didn't spend much time on that - though we may double back and re-consider if your interests change.
Titles. We finally got around to working on titles. Process = write a list of ideas from your story; then list language/metaphors associated with those ideas => but which do not state the idea directly (if you are writing about Jealousy, that is the one word you can't use). The point of these moves is to get a pile of words you can mix up - like paint - to come out with exactly the right color.
Next, you were asked to combine/permute these words/ideas into 5 possible titles = and choose.
We did some good work with this! As you continue to explore this method, don't be afraid to go way far afield when you are making your lists of metaphors and words. Make it anything you can think of list. This is the searching phase and you want to look everywhere. The getting choosey phase is later. Cast a wide net. Then combine and re-arrange.
For next week.
Read: cruise around Brevity,(check out the current issue) and Blackbird (check out the nonfiction gallery)
Blog 10: Draft short essay
Also: come to class prepared to write a descriptive passage that evokes an emotion/feeling, idea. No dialog. No internal reflection. You may describe humans doing things, but you can't get inside their heads. Should be fun, right?
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