10.8 Brainstorming for Essay 2 and more about form

We started class with an exercise on moments of realization.  You did a freewrite - not so much to get material but to open up your mind - get the editor turned off, and then you wrote a list of reailzations.  Points in your life, moments in time when you knew something more or differently after what ever that point in your life was.  After you wrote your list we talked through the different kinds of realizations we had:

• about parents - that they are human
• about loss and how we try to avoid it but avoiding it cuts out so much of what we cherish
• about unexpected feelings of sadness brought on by seeing something in particular (a short funeral procession)
• about how we are really just like that person who does that thing we can't stand (we do it too)
• how we can go to the same place and see more of it - that we never really see all that is there and it will be different each time we go to it
• how someone is not the person we thought they were but if we think about it they were always the way we see them now only we couldn't "see" it
• how someone had a different interpretation of what they said or did than we understood (the story about the phone number)
• that some people do things right in front of our face that we interpret as OK but when we think about it - it's not quite right (the priest story)
• how we often assume behavior is normal and act accordingly and forget that some people are really different

After talking through these realizations, you wrote a "scene" from in or around the moment when you realized whatever it was.  The place, the people, your thoughts and feelings, any conversation you remember.  Then I asked to you look at the details you provided, and pointedly ask yourself what you left out, or if there were any other ways of representing what you put down, if there were things you weren't sure of, or if there was someone else who was there and if they would represent it differently.

Below is a list of what you noticed about your representations of your "moments of realization."

hazy on the details
tendency to leave out the hard stuff
leave out what confilicts with our ideas of what happened
leave out people things that seem "inconsequential" to the focus
leave out interpretatons
hazy on the feelings
can't recall the context (cause) 


We then had a short discussion of what this process of identifying moments of realization, writing the details/a scene of that realization, and then noting the features of your representation can do for you as part of a brainstorming process.  We noted that this kind of a process might be particularly important when writing about material that we are particularly invested in.  Good enough.

During the last section of class we talked about The Patch, and Silent Dancing in terms of how they were "built" and how the structure created the meaning.  

The Patch and Silent Dancing.
We talked about these two essays.  I meant to get to some more detailed analysis of how the structure worked but we didn't quite get there. First we generated a list of what the essays were "about" = the ideas or feelings that operated as a kind of center for the stories/material the author presented.  Then we puled out some of the recurring images or metaphors the author resorted to in his/her telling of the story. We also noticed how these two essays lead us to a final scene which calls upon much, if not all, of the material the authors have placed in our way, as if, they are orchestrating an experience of reading an essay which will allow us to see the thoughts and feelings evoked by their writing both in terms of our own experiences, and theirs. 

For next week:
Blog 6: Brainstorming for Long Essay 2

Next class will be devoted to work on drafting long essay to, so come to class with some material to work with.