WRITING FICTION

Good Morning, Gang,

A couple of things to help you out with the assignment and tonight's homework.

For the written letter (and your subsequent workshop letters)  to Amy Hemphel, consider the following approach:

1. What are the strongest things about the story for you? Describe how they are working for you as a reader.

2.  What are the story's weaknesses? Are there places, details, word-choices that might be polished, changed, refined?

3. Character development. Are all of the characters well-developed and necessary? Did something strike you as not ringing true?

4. Consider writing style, literary moves (alliteration, assonance, consonance, metaphor, simile,) and the general pace of the writing. Be sure to note things that you notice and enjoy, as well as those that seem excessive, etc.

5. Give a general sense of your reading first-time through to final reading. Maybe you found something confusing the first time around but then with a closer read it cleared up? Maybe you found the ending to be too sudden or wrapped-up or unsatisfying.  Maybe you just loved the writing and envied certain images. All of these are great material for your letter.
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The Gallery Piece:

The assignment that I gave to Michael might need some tailoring now that you're read Camoin's list story (The Things I Did to Make it Possible).

If so, here's a simple way to approach it:
Find a piece of artwork in the museum, a gallery, etc.
List a minimum of 15 concrete words from it.
Use as many of those words as you can in a story that you write made in a list format.
Don't forget how helpful a title can be to directing us to have a sense of what your topic is.

Finally, don't worry too much about making sense at first. It's better to do a lean line drawing and have good lines and then flesh it out later.

Remember how engaging Camoin's piece was because of detail and the way that there was a mystery to what was causing his tension/worry.  Let yourself have lines like that.