Think of the time you were most embarrassed growing up. Make some notes about it… what was the weather like? What time of day was it? How old were you? Who was there? What specifically about the situation was embarrassing, and why?
Next, place your narrator outside the event as an observer, and try to recreate that scene as though it were not you, but another person who is embarrassed.
Next, write about how this event affected that character much later in life.
2. Can’t you smell that smell.
Find a quiet place where you can relax and feel safe. Close your eyes for five minutes, and during this time, try to remember the smells of your childhood. Try to think of very specific smells, with very clear associations. After the five minutes, write down the five clearest smells you can remember. Begin brainstorming, who do these smells remind you of, why? What were the circumstances when you last experienced the smell? Had you thought of it recently? Often? Or had you forgotten it? Allow your mind to make associations outside of these things, and take notes.
Quickly write for five minutes on the most promising or interesting ideas.
3. Stand in the place where you are.
Stop whatever you are doing. Go look out the window for ten minutes, do not let anything take you away from it. Make note of the details of what you see. Not just a bird. What kind of bird? What color? Male or female? How would you find out? What else do you see? People? Leaves? The sky? The Ground? What are the smallest details you can see?
What does all of this scene remind you of? If someone walked into this scene, where would they be going, and why? What is their need, and what is the obstacle?
4. It was right there all along.
Pick up the book or newspaper or magazine nearest you. Open to a random page without looking, and poke your finger at a word. Look at it. Choose the nearest concrete noun or verb, and write that down. Do this five more times in this book. Do this for at least 3 books.
Look at your list of words. Without thinking too much, write a scene or a poem which uses all of these words. Try to make it about a paragraph long, but do not worry about it making too much sense.
There is a person in this scene. They do not know why they are there. Do not explain it to them, but explain that person to me.
5. It’s not really stealing.
Begin with the last line (or any line) from another poem. Write from there, and do not stop until you get to the bottom of the page.
Some Thoughts on Creative Writing and Other Resources:
A few resources:
There are a great number of poems available online for free, but probably your best resources are
The Poetry Foundation – http://www.poetryfoundation.org
The Academy of American Poets – http://poets.org
As far a short stories go, I am posting a few on Blackboard, but I highly recommend searching for Hemmingway stories online or in the library…
here’s one, for example: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/heming.html
also, here: http://www.mrbauld.com/hemclean.html
There is also quite a collection of stories here: http://www.classicshorts.com/bib.html I highly recommend Chekhov, O. Henry, and Jack London.
Going about writing a poem or a story, or even a personal essay, is quite a different exercise than writing an academic essay like we have been doing. For one thing, we often do not know where one of these artistic type things is going to go when we begin writing. The end goal is to finish the story or poem, rather than to make a point or an argument.
So, as you sit down to write, do not expect to know exactly how this thing is going to go. It is not an essay. Let go of that expectation…
On the other hand, we do need a starting point, don’t we? If we sat around and waited for inspiration to strike, we may not ever write the first word. Instead, I am offering a few exercises below to get those creative juices flowing.
Because we are explicitly not making an argument or essay out of these assignments, I want you to pay more attention to how you are using the language as you are writing. We did not get a lot of time to talk about things such as rhyme or rhythm in great detail, nor sentence structure or dialogue.
One question you can ask yourself (after you have written) is whether what you wrote is beautiful. Read it out loud to yourself. And I don’t mean whisper it, I mean standing on a table in the library shouting it out. Not really, but read it out loud, as if you want someone across the room to be able to hear. Can you make the sound fit the meaning?
A sentence can be as smooth as the sunlit ocean on a warm summer day.
It can also present the same kind of disturbance that a storm might cause in the night sky.
Do you see how these two sentences work to mimic/reflect/enhance their content? There are many reasons as to how this works, but let us say that it is the relationship between meaning and the sounds! This applies to stories as much as to poetry.
I cant wait for the soccer world cup to begin. This is one of the moments that i can wait to enjoy on my wide screen. There are so many great teams that qualified for this event. My favorite to consider champion would be Argentina or Chile but Spain and Portugal are definite contenders to take the...
Class, I am sure you already referred to the Peer Response Letters assignment for Paper 1 (since it's the same exercise) as you've been getting ready for class this week, but just in case, here are the details again.
Due Date: Tuesday, November 19.
Description: To provide structured responses to your peers’ essays.
Purpose: As a collaborative class, this is one of the more important pieces. Your goal is to help your peers create a better paper through feedback.
Details:
1 – Read each of your group members’ papers. Take notes as you read, such as what strikes you as well done, where you get confused, and what kinds of improvements you think could be accomplished.
2 – Write a letter in response to each of these essays of at least 300 words (1.5 pages) addressing the following:
a) What are three things the essay does well?
b) Where do you get confused by reading the essay?
c) Where do you think the author could be more specific?
d) How do you think the structure works? Are there changes that could / need to be made?
3 – As you are reading the papers and writing the letters, refer to the peer review checklist in CTRW (pg 255).
4 – Print a copy of these letters for me, and one for the appropriate team member (i.e. – you should have two copies of each letter in class next week).
Expected Time Commitment: You should expect this assignment to take approximately 2 - 3 hours.
Important Considerations:
Just as you should expect and hope for good responses from your group members, they are expecting the same from you. Be sure you allow enough time to thoroughly read and respond to your peers’ essays.
The writing paper for the first one was not that bad; although finding good resource was though. The other difficulties I had on my first essay was the organization it seem to get hard for me when I jumble up all my topics. I am working on getting more organized...
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I am finding the research process gets easier with each paper. I chose my subject because it was current and affected every American. I started my search using Google Scholar. After finding many books on the topic I then turned to the NVCC library search engine to find articles. I found several articles covering my topic.
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In my opinion, “Text” is a way that people can communicate together to transfer the information that they want to give to other. ”Text” is a powerful tool that people can express what they think, what they feel, what they want, or what they need. For example the word “eat”, there is only one...
In my opinion, text can refer to anything and is a set of arbitrary symbols and texts are used to convey something. We see texts every day and everywhere with or without even noticing it is a text. Writers and journalists use texts to write books, newspapers, or journals. In this case, texts are...
Nowadays, we are facing a lot of problems in every aspect of life such as education, politics, economics and health. For my paper two, I decided to write about obesity, which is one of concerns of health-related problem. I think I could find many sources of this topic since it is a quite common...
First of all, when I decide to write about any topic, I will think if that topic is controversial enough to talk about. I do not want my topic is too narrow, because I will run out of idea to develop my essay. I will do some research about my topic on google to make sure that I will have enough...
During my research, I’ve had troubles finding enough sources to support any of my topics. I’ve run into brick walls and most of the topics I’ve chosen had information but were solely based on opinions. I wanted to do a research paper that was factual. If I’m doing a research paper, I was going to...
The research process had been fairly straight forward for paper number two in my experience. I have been finding a majority of my resources using NOVAs library of resources, primarily Academic Search Complete, or EBSCOhost. Most of the articles I have located thus far have fortunately been...
Any form of communication, whether it is verbal, non-verbal, or written is a form of “TEXT”. It is anything that can be interpreted and have meaning to the person who is interpreting.
Being touched by your significant other, usually have a different meaning than being touched by a casual...
The research process for the second paper is much easier than the first paper. I have developed some experiences; starting from what topic to choose, differentiate what source is more credible and acceptable for this class, and I am able to manage my time.
When I was writing the first paper, I...
