Note that Sean Woolford’s weblog has been added to the list here. Sean is a student in Composition and has expressed interest in the weblog and I hope will be building his typepad space into a portfolio that doesn’t just contemplate the good and bad of college Composition but that also allows for tracing his learning career at Tunxis, much as Susan Gibb has been doing for the last few years over at Spinning and Learning to Spin, the Spinning splinter cloister.

Sean’s a smart guy. He expresses himself well in writing.

I want to see interested students use the weblog as a space that does a lot: it demonstrates what they’re leaning in school and out; it creates a space for examination and following of interests that can be expressed publicly; it allows for people like me to follow them; it organizes learning, knowledge, and problem solving into relevant areas. Will Sean’s weblog become his space where I can go to evaluate what he’s doing in class and enjoy visiting just to read? Hopefully. Will it become a critical tool for the things that come and are relevant to it? Hopefully. Will it come to justify its costs monthly? Susan can answer that one.

Here’s the charge for Sean: if you have and use the typepad space I don’t need a paper journal. Move the journal from paper to the online space, but keep the class notes as a map for posts; respond to the readings online; consider categories built around process; and if you come across things that apply to the current issues under consideration, such as cause and effect, generate some posts on those.

What are the advantages:

Portability
The work here can be seen by anyone: recruiters, evaluators, colleagues, friends.

Look and Feel
The space can be customized and organized and professionalized so that presentation is tailored for different audiences. Sensitive material can be hidden, excluded, or sent elsewhere. The space can be used to demonstrate whatever one wishes

Control
People are in control of the content and organization such that the weblog becomes authoritative and representative. And the archive proves the work.

Susan Gibb writes

Excellent writers group meeting tonight, and I’ll post more on it tomorrow. But one thing remains floating in my mind that I wanted to put down.

One of the workshopped pieces we felt needed a character buildup, fleshing out. While I said at the time that we need to sympathize with the protagonist, the author rightly said that it is not a likeable character, and that’s exactly the reaction he wanted to him.

This is very true, of course. It’s not sympathy or empathy we’re seeking from the reader for the character, it’s knowing him well enough to love or hate him. Otherwise, we just really don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to him, or his story.

My question goes to the nature of the story in this regard. I agree that the success of a character depends less on likeability than on depth and dimension, but without development, change, or disruption, then what reaction to a character will come other than “okay but so what?”

If a story is mearly meant as an exercise in getting a specific reaction from the audience, the story becomes a manipulative prod, much like ghasts in a haunted house. Is a story really meant for workshop that seeks nothing more for itself?

Susan Gibb at her weblog creative writing journal asks a good question

I don’t know that I have ever gone back and added in so much, a good forty percent increase–and no doubt some will be cut out–and I wonder why the images don’t come with the first writing, why the story wasn’t clear as it unfolded.

I don’t know if I have a good answer for this, but I know what she’s talking about. She also writes

Much of the simple description, the simile and metaphor, a single added movement of the protagonist, reveals so much more about her.

Many writers on writing comment on how a character in the writing process develops upon reflection, revision, and rewriting. Character in the building of the story is an element of knowledge. A character may be something that we come to know, something that we discover after lots of thinking (writing). It begins as something we don’t know and is slowly uncovered (discovered).

I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

Abbot knows the process. The finished work reveals the results.

The written synopsis of the film Mirrormask, which looks like a nice bit of eyechocolate, reads like this

MirrorMask centers on Helena, a 15 year old girl in a family of circus entertainers, who often wishes she could run off and join real life. After a fight with her parents about her future plans, her mother falls quite ill and Helena is convinced that it is all her fault. On the eve of her mother’s major surgery, she dreams that she is in a strange world with two opposing queens, bizarre creatures, and masked inhabitants. All is not well in this new world – the white queen has fallen ill and can only be restored by the MirrorMask, and it’s up to Helena to find it. But as her adventures continue, she begins to wonder whether she’s in a dream, or something far more sinister.

I don’t see how this synopsis is compelling–do we need another white queen?–but the question of the diegetic world is brought into the mix here. The border of the story becomes confused with the space of reality. I liked Nightmare on Elm Street for its play with the real and dreamed. By the way, why is it up to Helena to find the mask? In addition, I just read the synopsis to Constantine. I don’t want to see the movie after reading the synopsis. I want to yawn . . . or weep.

This American Life does a great job on the romance writing industry. It’s a good look into the business of writing this kind of fiction.

A commercial for the pill says “Be true to yourself.” This could mean when you feel like having sex go for it as long as you’re taking the correct medication. Or it may mean, don’t worry about the typical stuff and go with your gut, your intuition.

And as Microsoft and Mozilla rush to fix the cracks in the pipes, and we continue our struggle with perverse spam in these places, life goes on.

“Be true to yourself.” It’s an odd and philosophical appeal. Langston Hughes had all kinds of fun with it. But what happens to a thing if its critical to scene, atmosphere, or the push of a story, such as a pencil or hair or the dash of a car or the look of the lights across the horizon as one begins the descent home?

I can remember that, since it’s come back. The long drive home at night, watching the glow beneath the clouds, then reaching the top of the rise, losing the road just for a moment, and the drive becomes not a drive but a flight, not a dip down, but a sudden ascent, and the city isn’t a city

then what?

A recent Fiction Writing session dealt with the idea of meaning in story, that is literary meaning in the context of craft discussion. The subject was “Deportation at Breakfast,” a story by Larry Fondation. I don’t think I discourage discussions of meaning in story but I do make a distinction between the analysis of craft, especially in a course’s early stages, and literary analysis.

The “literary meaning” of a story is a big time issue but the “meaning” of “meaning” changes with context. Is Fondation’s story about the triumph of the individual; is it about the inevitability of change; is it about the roles we assume; is it about exile (deportation); is it about being the good guy; is it about sacrifice? Does the story situate itself in a modernist tradition of objectivism? What is the model of analysis? I know that the story works within its “frame of time” until it ends and normalcy resumes. A man is left at the counter, wondering about tomorrow.

Is that enough? I’m going to let the students fight this one out.

The question for me will be: what makes the story work and how does figuring an answer free up the fingertips as we walk our characters onto that tentative white and move them into the window frame.

Stories are cool, stories are fine. In my family, my son sits rivetted while my wife makes up stories on the spot. Stories about pencils, shoes, and planets. She is the “provider” of story. And then “this” happened and the boy laughs and laughs then asks for more. “Tell me a story about the couch,” he says. And she must perform.

To children the story is a basic way of organizing the world, and I’d submit that the need continues into adulthood. Why, because we encounter the world as a sequence, as if every next thing is waiting behind a blind corner, as Frog tells Toad. In Larry Fondation’s “Deportation at Breakfast” we get such a sequence of world building, of things waiting behind the corner. A man comes to a diner, finds that he must cook his own eggs, and ends up owning the joint for at least a day. Beyond that, there’s just conjecture.

The protagonist is “lured” into the diner with the promise of inexpensive food. The place appeals, “family-run and clean,” the signs “neat,” and the interior is “old-fashioned.” But the protagonist also has an appealing disposition. He sits at the counter, “leaving the empty tables for other customers that might come in.” He seems like a nice guy, just any guy looking for a clean place to eat. All fairly pleasant and normal. Stuff happens, though, after Javier takes his order. I love it that he orders the cheese omelette.

The eggs were spread out on the griddle, the bread plunged inside the toaster, when the authorities came in. They grabbed Javier quickly and without a word, forcing his hands behind his back. He, too, said nothing. He did not resist, and they shoved him out the door and into their waiting car.

On the grill, my eggs bubbles. I looked around for another employee–maybe one out back somewhere, or in the washroom. I leaned over the counter and called for someone. No one answered.

So, Javier gets taken. Next sentence, the eggs are bubbling. Perfect. So we have a normal scene interrupted by something extraordinary, an action that needs a response. Causality. Something has to happen here. Javier starts the eggs, gets taken, and thus leaves the eggs.

I could smell my eggs starting to burn. I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. I thought about Javier and stared [no gazing here] at my eggs. After some hesitation, I got up from my red swivel stool and went behind the counter. I grabbed a spare apron, then picked up the spatula and turned my eggs.

Here the character jumps right into things and everything from here on falls into place. He returns to the counter to ring people up then goes back to finish preparing his own meal. This meal is interrupted by another party. Fondation writes

I thought of telling them I didn’t work there [curious the use of “there,” the story being told after the fact]. But perhaps they were hungry . . . I got busy at the grill.

The story ends with a sense of “taking over.” The main character will post an ad for help, and he reveals some hesitation about being in the restaurant business. But regardless of the total turnabout, the change that happens in the story, the eggs on the grill remain the causal agent. The guy’s got to do something and he ends up doing lots more. The story takes a common situation and turns it into something extraordinary, something that stays with the reader. It takes a regular guy and leaves him at a place he’s never been before.

LTS writes of voice in fiction

Voice, I have found, is not necessarily a single entity assigned to a writer, but something that is uniquely his or hers to formulate into a recognizable perhaps, but multilingual style creation of a skilled writer. We all have several voices, most noticeably the contrast between our content self and the one who is upset or angry. Perhaps another way of describing the difference is the way we are with friends versus the way we are with strangers, or in an environment in which we are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or intimidated.

I don’t know if voice has a lot to do with style or the crafting of a piece, but I do know that it’s a tough thing to rationalize or put into explanatory language. It may be something that just is. It may be something having to do with point of view, the way a persona “sees” the world in the narrative. It’s also hard to come up with examples of voice in a fiction that demonstrates “itself.” Here are the first few sentences of The Signing by Stephen Dixon

My wife dies. I kiss her hands and leave the hospital room. A nurse runs after me as I walk down the hall.

Here the narrator, the protagonist, tells us only what happens, so what dominates the entrance into the story is event and cause and effect: “this happened; I did this.” We will learn in the story that the “the voice” isn’t about rationalizing, explaining, or commenting. At this point I would say that the story as a whole must sustain the “point of view” and the mannerism of the narrator in his telling. He must have mannerisms, a way of talking, moving, and seeing. Here’s some of the dialogue

“They want you back upstairs to sign some papers,” he says.

“Too late. She’s dead. I’m alone. I kissed her hands. You can have the body. I just want to far away from here and as soon as I can.

. . . .

“Do what you want with her body. There’s nothing I ever want to do with her again. I’ll never speak her name. Never go back to our apartment. Our car I’m going to let rot in the street till it’s towed away. This wristwatch. She bought it for me and wore it a few times herself.” I throw it out the window.

Consistent. Speedy. A particular use of words and phrasing. “I’ll never speak her name. Never go back . . . Our car . . .” and so forth. This voice just works.

Linking from a writing journal is going to be cool, dude. This is the stuff.

Susan Gibb is putting up course notes in an alternative space called Learning to Spin. She will provide us a good example of using the technology as a focused learning space.