Creative Writing Course

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2009-06-01T08:48:00.008+12:00

[Hokusai: The Great Wave (1823)]

Creative Writing

Administration:

Welcome

Course Timetable

Course Requirements

Course Description

Assignments

[Buddhist Mandala]

Lectures & Workshops:

Lecture 1 - Fiction: What is It?
- Workshop 1
Lecture 2 - Fiction: Character
- Workshop 2
Lecture 3 - Fiction: Setting
- Workshop 3
Lecture 4 - Fiction: Point of View
- Workshop 4
Lecture 5 - Fiction: Detail
- Workshop 5
Lecture 6 - Fiction: Meaning
- Workshop 6
Lecture 7 - Poetry: What is It?
- Workshop 7
Lecture 8 - Poetry: Storytelling
- Workshop 8
Lecture 9 - Poetry: Imagery
- Workshop 9
Lecture 10 - Poetry: Figures of Speech
- Workshop 10
Lecture 11 - Poetry: Form
- Workshop 11
Lecture 12 - Poetry: Precision

[Poetry off the Page]

Lecture 12

2009-05-31T10:06:00.016+12:00

[Eugenio Montale (1896-1981)]

Week 12:

Lecture 12

Poetry: Precision

Texts:

James K. Baxter, ‘from Jerusalem Sonnets’
Janet Charman, ‘injection’
Grant Duncan, ‘April without her’
Anne Kennedy, ‘One of my Honolulu Sonnets’
Robert Lowell, ‘Skunk Hour’
Eugenio Montale, ‘Montale's Sunflower’
C. K. Stead, ‘from The Masks of Catullus’
Derek Walcott, ‘from The Schooner Flight’:
Part 8: Fight with the Crew

This is the last lecture in our series on poetry. It's also the last lecture in the course. It seems like a good time to think about what we've been doing for the past three months, and also to make some general reflections on the subject of creative writing in general.

I've called this last lecture "Precision”. Mark Twain once compiled a list of seven rules for writers, which I would commend to your attention. He says that a writer should:

Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
Use the right word, not its second cousin.
Eschew surplusage.
Not omit necessary details.
Avoid slovenliness of form.
Use good grammar.
Employ a simple and straightforward style.

That all sounds simple and straightforward enough, but - as you've no doubt found out by now - clarity and precision are generally the hardest things to achieve.

George Orwell came up with an almost equally famous set of rules in his essay "Politics and the English Language" (1946):

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

One interesting way of applying these suggestions is through the test of translation. Is what you're saying clear and coherent enough to survive being turned into another language?

Let's take one of the most famous poems in world literature, Catullus's "Odi et amo" [I hate and I love] ...

Masks of Catullus

Odi et amo, quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.
– Gaius Valerius Catullus (c.84-54 BC): Elegy LXXXV

Ōdī ět ămō quārē ĭd făcĭăm fŏrtăssě rěquīrĭs
[I detest and I love. Why that I may do, perhaps you ask.]
Nĕscĭō sěd fĭěrī sěntĭŏ ět ěxcrŭcĭŏr
[I do not know, but to become I sense and I am tortured.]

I hate and love; would’st thou the reason know?
I know not, but I burn, and feel it so.
– Richard Lovelace (1618-1657)

I hate and love – ask why – I can’t explain;
I feel ’tis so, and feel it racking pain.
– Charles Lamb (1775-1834)

I hate and love. Why? You may ask but
It beats me. I feel it done to me, and ache.
– Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

O th’hate I move love. Quarry it fact I am, for that’s so re queries.
Nescience, say th’ fiery scent I owe whets crookeder.
– Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978)

[Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema, "Catullus at Lesbia's"]

•

Montale's Sunflower

Portami il girasole ch’io lo trapianti
Bring me the sunflower so that I can transplant it
nel mio terreno bruciato dal salino,
in my soil burnt by salt air,
e mostri tutto il giorno agli azzurri specchianti
and show all day to the mirroring blues
del cielo l’ansietà del suo volto giallino.
of the sky the anxiety of its yellow face.

Tendono alla chiarità le cose oscure,
Dark things tend towards clarity,
si esauriscono i corpi in un fluire
bodies consume themselves in a flowing
di tinte: queste in musiche. Svanire
of colours: these in music. Vanishing
è dunque la ventura delle venture.
is thus the chance of chances.

Portami tu la pianta che conduce
Bring me the plant that leads
dove sorgono bionde trasparenze
where blonde transparencies arise
e vapora la vita quale essenza;
and life evaporates like spirit;
portami il girasole impazzito di luce.
bring me the sunflower crazed with the light.

- Eugenio Montale, Tutte le Poesie, ed. Giorgio Zampa, 1984 (Milano: Mondadori, 1991): 34.

Bring me the sunflower for me to transplant
to my own ground burnt by the spray of sea,
and show all day to the imaging blues
of sky that golden-faced anxiety.

Things hid in darkness lean towards the clear,
bodies consume themselves in a flowing
of shades: and they in varied music – showing
the chance of chances is to disappear.

So bring me the plant that takes you right
where the blond hazes shimmering rise
and life fumes to air as spirit does;
bring me the sunflower crazy with the light.

- Eugenio Montale, Selected Poems, trans. George Kay, 1964 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969): 25.

Bring me the sunflower, I’ll plant it here
in my patch of ground scorched by salt spume,
where all day long it will lift the craving
of its golden face to the mirroring blue.

Dark things are drawn to brighter,
bodies languish in a flowing
of colors, colors in musics. To vanish,
then, is the venture of ventures.

Bring me the flower that leads us out
where blond transparencies rise
and life evaporates as essence.
Bring me the sunflower crazed with light.

- William Arrowsmith, trans. Cuttlefish Bones (New York: Norton, 1992): 51.

Bring me the sunflower so I can plant it
in my ground burnt as may be with sea salt,
that all day it display to the blue mirror-
wise sky anxious concern of its yellow face.

Obscure things are impelled towards clarity,
bodies exhaust themselves in fluent change
of shades; these, in music. To disappear
is then the chanciest of chances.

Bring me the plant which may lead us
where the fair rise and are translucent,
where life delivers itself into finest spirit:
bring me the sunflower crazed with light.

- Kendrick Smithyman, trans. Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian, 1993 (Auckland: The Writers Group, 2004): 55.

[Vincent Van Gogh: Sunflowers (1888)]

Workshop 11

2009-05-30T10:46:00.014+12:00

Holly Crawford:
13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Week 12:

Workshop 11

Group 4: Peer Critiques.
Group 4: poems returned, with corrections and provisional grades.

Remember, as you work on your poetry portfolios, that only the two completed exercises have to follow the instructions exactly. (Please remember to specify which exercises it was you did).

Your class poem and your new poem do not have to be based on exercises, though they can be if you wish.

The Reflection essay you write should be about one of these two poems, not about one of your two exercises. You'll be marked half on your comments on the poem from the Book of Readings that inspired / provoked / parallels your own piece, and half on the comments on your own process of composition.

NB: It follows that either your class poem or your new poem must be connected in some way with one of the poems in the Book of Readings.

Next week:

All Groups: Poetry Portfolios Due Friday, 28/10/11.

Hand them in with assignment cover sheet (+ a stamped, self-addressed envelope if you’d like to get them back promptly) into the assignment box on Atrium Level 2.

Please be very careful to carry out all of the assignment specifications, outlined in more detail here.

Lecture 11

2009-05-29T10:53:00.007+12:00

[e e cummings]

Week 11:

Lecture 11

Poetry: Form

Texts:

Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’
e. e. cummings, ‘l(a’
Allen Curnow, ‘The Game of Tag’
Matt Harris, ‘Pathoscape’
Peter Reading, ‘from Perduta gente’
Hone Tuwhare, ‘cummings’
Sonja Yelich, ‘narrow neck from the boat ramp’

English Metres:

˘ / ΄

1) iamb / iambic metre: unstressed syllable / stressed syllable

˘ ΄ / ˘ ΄ / ˘ ΄ / ˘ ΄
Whose woods / these are / I think / I know (Frost)

΄ / ˘

2) trochee / trochaic metre: stressed syllable / unstressed syllable

΄ ˘ / ΄ ˘/ ΄ ˘ / ΄
Onward / led the / road a/gain (Housman)

˘ / ˘ / ΄

3) anapaest / anapaestic metre: 2 unstressed syllables / 1 stressed syllable

˘ ˘ ΄ / ˘ ˘ ΄ / ˘ ˘ ΄ / ˘ ˘ ΄
The Assy/rian came down / like a wolf / on the fold (Byron)

΄ / ˘ / ˘

4) dactyl / dactylic metre: 1 stressed syllable / 2 unstressed syllables

΄ ˘ ˘ / ΄ ˘ ˘ / ΄ ˘ ˘ / ΄ ˘
Softly and / tenderly / Jesus is / calling (Hymn)

a foot = one iamb, trochee, anapaest or dactyl

four feet = a tetrameter
five feet = a pentameter
six feet = a hexameter

Common English Verse Forms:

Alliterative Verse:

We were talking of dragons, // Tolkien and I
In a Berkshire bar. // The big workman
Who had sat silent // and sucked his pipe
All the evening, // from his empty mug
with gleaming eye // glanced towards us;
'I seen 'em myself', // he said fiercely.

- C. S. Lewis, "We were talking of dragons"

Heroic Couplet:

A little learning is a dangerous thing; - A
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring - A

- Alexander Pope, "Essay on Criticism"

Ballad Metre:

They hadna sailed a league, a league,
A league but barely three, - A
When the lift grew dark, and the wind blew loud
And gurly grew the sea. - A

- Anon, "Sir Patrick Spens"

Quatrains:

Whose woods these are I think I know - A
His house is in the village, though; - A
He will not see me stopping here - B
To watch his woods fill up with snow - A

My little horse must think it queer - B
To stop without a farmhouse near - B
Between the woods and frozen lake - C
The darkest evening of the year. - B
...

– Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

Sonnet (14 lines)
[Petrarchan (or Italian)]

[octet]:
The tower’s broken, and the leafy tree - A
which shaded all the spirals of my mind - B
has withered up. How can I hope to find - B
the same again, lost on this trackless sea? - A
Death, you reached out that day so easily - A
to choke my love to dust; left life behind. - B
No earthly empire, clout of any kind - B
– gold, precious stones – will give it back to me. - A

[sestet]:
And if Fate wants to tell me my worst fears - C
were always justified, what can I say - D
but sorry? Do, but bow to hide my tears? - C
Life can look fine from far enough away, - D
but losing in one morning seven years - C
of tenderness, is quite a price to pay! - D

– Francesco Petrarca, "Rott’è l'alta colonna"

The rhyme-scheme of the octet is invariable; the sestet, on the other hand, can take a variety of forms:

C D D C D D
C D E C D E
C D C D C D

Sonnet (14 lines)
[Shakespearean (or English)]

[3 quatrains]:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? - A
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: - B
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, - A
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: - B

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, - C
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; - D
And every fair from fair sometime declines, - C
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; - D

But thy eternal summer shall not fade - E
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; - F
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, - E
When in eternal lines to time thou growest: - F
[couplet]:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, - G
So long lives this and this gives life to thee. - G

– William Shakespeare, "Sonnet XVIII"

It's much harder to find plausible rhymes in English than it is in Italian (or in other Romance languages, for that matter), so the Shakespearean sonnet only commits you to finding one rhyme for each word, rather than the up-to-three required by the Petrarchan structure.

Concrete Poetry:

[George Herbert: The Altar.]

The Altar

A broken A L T A R, Lord, thy servant reares,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch’d the same.
A H E A R T alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow’r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name;
That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed S A C R I F I C E be mine,
And sanctifie this A L T A R to be thine.

- from The Temple (1633)

[Guillaume Apollinaire: Poèmes à Lou, XXII]

Reconnais-toi
[Recognise yourself]
cette adorable personne c’est toi
[this adorable person is you]
sous le grand chapeau caroline
[under the big Carolina hat]
oeil
[eye]
nez
[nose]
la bouche
[mouth]
voici l’ovale de la figure
[here is the oval of your face]
ton cou
[your neck]

et puis
[and then]
un peu plus bas
[a bit lower down]
c’est ton coeur qui bat
[there’s your beating heart]

ni
[nor]
ci confus
[should we mix with it]
l’impure
[the impure]
par le mirage
[through the mirage]
de ton buste adoré
[of your loved breast]
un comma
[a comma]
à travers un nuage
[through a cloud]

- "Poème du 9 février 1915"
[Poem from 9th February, 1915]

[Concrete Poem]

Workshop 10

2009-05-28T08:42:00.011+12:00

[Peter Edwards:
Peter Reading: Poet]

Week 11:

Workshop 10

Group 3: Peer Critiques.
Group 3: poems returned, with corrections and provisional grades.
Distribute Group 4 poems.

Poetry Exercise 5: Content vs. form

In Peter Reading’s book Perduta Gente [= Lost People (a reference to Dante's Inferno)], some of the poems echo the sound as well as the content of what his characters are saying.
Imagine someone you know making an angry / drunken / tearful speech.
Try to write it down as exactly as possible – sound, slurring, EMPHASIS.
The emotion of the words should come across in the way they’re written down.
(minimum 14 lines)

Next week:

Group 4: Peer Critiques.

Lecture 10

2009-05-27T08:26:00.009+12:00

[Rainy Day in Brussels]

Week 10:

Lecture 10

Poetry: Figures of Speech

Texts:

W. H. Auden, ‘Brussels in Winter’ (1938 / 1966)
Kevin Ireland, ‘Cloud’
Thérèse Lloyd, ‘In Levin’
Deborah Pope, ‘Getting Through’
Jack Ross, ‘Coromandel’
William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnets 130 & 138’

•

Simile [one thing compared to another]:

my Luve's like a red, red, rose
[Robert Burns]

Metaphor [one thing described as another]:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
– Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
[William Wordsworth]

Metonymy [part or attribute used for whole]:

You can’t fight City Hall
The pen is mightier than the sword

Synecdoche [part used for whole]:

50 head of cattle
Mouths to feed
Hands to the pump

[Figures of Speech]

•

In one of his lectures on poetry, the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges comments that the Chinese metaphor for "everything" is "the 10,000 things." He goes on to speculate that if one took every one of these 10,000 things, and compared to every other one in the list, one would arrive at a grand total of 99, 990, 000 possible metaphors in the world. (Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse: The Complete Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard University. 1967. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000.)

That might seem a bit fanciful, but I think the point he's making is that the idea of comparing one thing to another thing, either through metaphor or simile, is one of the oldest poetic techniques known to man.

The other main branch on the tree of rhetorical figures up above is metonymy, which is the idea of taking one part of something to stand in for the whole: your wheels for your car, your threads for your suit, etc.

Metonymy, then, invents nothing: it simply condenses and simplifies the things we see around us. Metaphor, on the other hand, tries to set two different things (one present, one imaginary) side by side in your mind.

If you're interested in following up on the technicalities of this, you might want to read the extract below. For the moment, though, it's perhaps more important for us to see how these devices operate in some of the poems above.

[Jorge Luis Borges]

•

Two Types of Aphasia

... The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively. In aphasia one or the other of these two processes is restricted or totally blocked - an effect which makes the study of aphasia particularly illuminating for the linguist. In normal verbal behavior both processes are continually operative, but careful observation will reveal that under the influence of a cultural pattern, personality, and verbal style, preference is given to one of the two processes over the other.

In verbal art the interaction of these two elements is especially pronounced. Rich material for the study of this relationship is to be found in verse patterns which require a compulsory parallelism between adjacent lines, for example in Biblical poetry or in the Finnic and, to some extent, the Russian oral tradition. This provides an objective criterion of what in the given speech community acts as a correspondence. Since on any verbal level - morphemic, lexical, syntactic, and phraseological - either of these two relations (similarity and contiguity) can appear - and each in either of two aspects [substitutive and predicative], an impressive range of possible configurations is created. Either of the two gravitational poles may prevail. In Russian lyrical songs, for example, metaphoric constructions predominate, while in the heroic epics the metonymic way is preponderant.

- Roman Jakobson, "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles" (1956)

Roman Jakobson, an influential linguist and literary critic argues here that the two predominant types of aphasia - similarity and contiguity disorder - can be equated with the two major subdivisions of figurative language: metaphor and metonymy.

For Jakobson, then:

similarity disorder = selecting the wrong vocabulary items from pre-existing categories, substituting "fork" for "knife", "table" for "lamp," and so on.
contiguity disorder = failing to to combine words into a grammatical sentence, which leads to a tendency to confuse words with their approximate functions, and thus to the substitution (say) of "spyglass" with "microscope", or "fire" for "gaslight."

The two skills involved, the selection and combination of words and structures, are equated by him (respectively) with the poetic devices of metaphor and metonymy.

In the case of metaphor, one is selecting and substituting items not normally continuous with one another.

In the case of metonymy, one is combining things which naturally cohere, the part standing in for the whole.

In genre terms, Jakobson equates metonymy with the representative intentions of the epic or the realist novel: a part of a fictional world standing for its whole.

Similarly, he equates metaphor with lyric poetry, since the principle of asserting or pointing out the similarity of two alien or unrelated things is fundamental to its unificatory intentions.

Metaphor, as a device, might then be said to line up with Poetry, Romanticism, and (in anthropological terms) magical thinking (as seen in Homeopathy, for example).

Metonymy can be similarly associated with Prose, Realism and medical ideas of Contagion or Contamination.

[see further David Lodge, ed. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longman, 1988), pp.57-61.]

[Roman Jakobson (1896-1982)]

Workshop 9

2009-05-26T09:24:00.015+12:00

[Maxwell Armfield: Oxford Circus Underground Station (1905)]

Week 10:

Workshop 9

Group 2: Peer Critiques.
Group 2: poems returned, with corrections and provisional grades.
Distribute Group 3 poems.

Poetry Exercise 4: Petals on a wet, black bough
(Ezra Pound)

Matsuo Bashō was a seventeenth-century Japanese poet, who specialised in Haiku, a verse form with very strict rules and conventions (3 lines; 5 syllables / 7 syllables / 5 syllables; a seasonal reference).

However, Bashō himself wrote to one of his disciples:
Even if you have three or four extra syllables, or even five or seven, you needn't worry as long as it sounds right. But if even one syllable is stale in your mouth, give it all of your attention.

- Matsuo Bashō, Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings. Trans. Sam Hamill. Boston: Shambhala, 2000): xxvi-vii.

Modern Haiku poets have therefore discarded many of these conventions, especially the syllable count.
Go out of the classroom for ten minutes.
In that time, you must find three images.
Come back and write them down.
Turn each one into a 3-line haiku, trying to portray the image itself as vividly as you can.
Each poem should convey a particular feeling: joy, sadness, humour – something you want to communicate through the picture.

Next week:

Group 4: Workshop Poems Due. Bring sufficient copies for the entire class.

Group 3: Peer Critiques

Lecture 9

2009-05-25T09:28:00.009+12:00

[Matsuo Bashō]

Week 9:

Lecture 9

Poetry: Imagery

Texts:

Matsuo Bashō, ‘Haiku’
Amy Brown, ‘Siamang’
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, ‘Home from Hospital’
Ruth Dallas, ‘Pioneer Woman with Ferrets’
Scott Hamilton, ‘1918’
Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1911 / 1913)
--, ‘from Lustra’

... ut pictura poesis
[... as in painting, so in poetry]

– Quintus Horatius Flaccus [Horace] (65-8 BC):
"De Arte Poetica" [On the Art of Poetry]

We talked a little bit last week about the revolution in poetic thinking which can be roughly dated to the eary part of the twentieth century: the rise of Modernism.

It's impossible to exaggerate the importance of the (re)discovery of Japanese and Chinese culture to the writers of this period.

Japanese prints led the way. Post-impressionist painters such as Gauguin and Van Gogh were heavily influenced by the bold yet subtle colours and clear outlines of Japanese print-makers.

The most famous example is probably Hokusai's Great Wave (1823), which I've put up on the cover page of this website. Here are some from a bit later in the century, though:

[Hyakurin Sori: A Beach at Sunrise]

[Hashimoto Sadahide: Western Traders at Yokohama (1861)]

One can see that this way of seeing Westerners has influenced (for instance) Van Gogh in the 1880s.

[Vincent Van Gogh: Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin (1888)]

Similarly, the subject-matter of many of these prints: the "Floating World", the area of gamblers, brothels and illicit drinking houses, inspired painters such as Gauguin not to be afraid of the (so-called) primitive and savage in their own work.

[Okumura Masanobu: The New Yoshiwara (1745)]

[Japanese Bathhouse]

[Paul Gauguin: Siesta (1894)]

[Paul Gauguin: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? (1897-98)]

It isn't so much whether they got it right or not - whether their interpretations of one of the most ancient and subtle cultures in the world were technically correct. From our point of view, what matters is how inspiring this new and radically simplified vision of the world was to Western artists. The japanese artist's eye seemed (at any rate) frank, objective, and non-judgemental.

And that turned out to be the case with Japanese poetry, also.

Which brings us to haiku, the standard Japanese form of verse. These are three-line poems designed to crystallise a great deal of experience in miniature:

5 syllables: The first cold shower
7 syllables: and even the monkey wants
5 syllables: a little straw coat

There's also tanka (or waka), a more ancient form, which actually gave rise to haiku in the first place:

5 syllables: Although I am sure
7 syllables: that he will not be coming
5 syllables: in the evening
7 syllables: when the locusts shrilly call
7 syllables: I go to the door and wait

Then there's renga, or linked verse, and haibun: a mixture between verse and prose.

There are two main techniques at work in traditional haiku:

two objects or things should be contrasted or set side-by-side
there should be a seasonal word or reference somewhere in the poem

So, to conclude, there's always been a strong connection between pictures and poetry. I began this section with a quote from the Latin poet Horace's treatise on the Art of Poetry. English poetry, too, began with a strong visual component in the form of kennings - a set of codified riddles intended to make one visualise one thing in terms of another.

Kennings:

Sea:
whale-road
swan-way

Blood:
slaughter-dew

Sword:
blood-worm

Battle:
sword-dance
spear-din

Slaughter-dew worm-dance
Spear-din dancer

[sail-road]

Workshop 8

2009-05-24T08:31:00.013+12:00

[Fleur Adcock]

Week 9:

Workshop 8

Group 1: Peer Critiques.
Group 1: poems returned, with corrections and provisional grades.
Distribute Group 2 poems.

We'll be discussing the lecture-topic and the whole concept of storytelling in poetry. This will entail looking at some of the examples from the reading we didn't get to at the lecture.

Poetry Exercise 3: Writing from elsewhere

Both Fleur Adcock’s “Camping” and Stu Bagby’s “First Dance” are stories about childhood experience told by an adult looking back.

Think of something (happy, sad, dramatic …) that happened to you as a child.

You’re now going to write a poem describing it.
First outline (quickly, in note form) the shape of the story, the sequence of events.
Then think about how old you were, what time of year it was, where it all took place.
When you start to write, try telling the story from the perspective of one of the other people involved, not from your own point-of-view.
Write it as briefly as possible – as if you were telling it as an anecdote to a group of people at a dinner-party.

(minimum 14 lines)

Next week:

Group 3: Workshop Poems Due. Bring sufficient copies for the entire class

Group 2: Peer Critiques

Lecture 8

2009-05-23T08:57:00.007+12:00

[Ezra Pound]

Week 8:

Lecture 8

Poetry: Storytelling

Texts:

Fleur Adcock, ‘Camping’
Stu Bagby, ‘First Dance’
Michael Jackson, ‘Sudan’
Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘Elegy for a School Mate’
Sylvia Plath, ‘The Thin People’ (1981 / 2000)
Ezra Pound, ‘The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’

I love the swift leap of a good story, the excitement that often commences in the first sentence, the sense of beauty and mystery found in the best of them; and the fact – so crucially important to me back at the beginning and now still a consideration – that the story can be written and read in one sitting. (Like poems!)

– Raymond Carver

We've already looked at Raymond Carver's fiction a couple of lectures ago (the story "Cathedral"), but let's just note here how little distinction he makes between poems and short stories. He wrote both, in fact, with equal success.

He's not the only poet to concentrate on storytelling, though. The ancient epic poets, Homer and Virgil, were concerned above all with narrative. So were their successors in the Middle Ages, Dante and Chaucer.

[Chaucer reads to Richard II and his court]

Workshop 7

2009-05-22T09:16:00.015+12:00

[Pieter Breughel: The Fall of Icarus (1558)]

Week 8:

Workshop 7

Distribute Group 1 poems.

Poetry Exercise 2: 13 Ways of looking at a …
(Wallace Stevens)

Bring a picture with you to class – perhaps a photograph out of a magazine, or any image which intrigues you in some way.

Using W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux-Arts" as a model, you’re going to write a poem describing it.
Look at the picture carefully. List the things you see in it.
How do you react to those things? Write down some of those reactions.
Try grouping them together. Are there common factors?
When you start to write, describe the picture, then your associations with it – what it means to you.
Remember, your poem must convey the essence of the picture even to a reader who can’t see it.

(minimum 14 lines)

Next week:

Group 2: Workshop Poems Due. Bring sufficient copies for the entire class

Group 1: Peer Critiques

Lecture 7

2009-05-21T08:49:00.015+12:00

[Kendrick Smithyman]

Week 7:

Lecture 7

Poetry: What is it?

Texts:

W. H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux-Arts’
Michael Jackson, ‘Green Turtle’
Cilla McQueen, ‘Timepiece’
Marianne Moore, ‘Poetry’
Frank O'Hara, ‘The Day Lady Died’
Kendrick Smithyman, ‘Peter Durey’s Story'
Wallace Stevens, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’

Poetry must be as well written as prose
– Ezra Pound

Nothing you couldn’t, in the stress of some emotion, actually say
– Ezra Pound

No ideas but in things
– William Carlos Williams

These three mantras go a long way towards summarising the Modernist approach to poetry. It's certainly not the only approach, but it's not a bad starting point.

Pound and Williams were in profound reaction against what they saw as the wordy, inexact poetry of the late nineteenth century. They wanted poetry to achieve the same precision and profundity as the novels and stories of Conrad, Flaubert and Tolstoy.

These rules were intended to help new groups of poets such as the Imagists or the Objectivists adopt a far more rigorous and scientific attitude towards the problem of charging language with as much richness and significance as it was possible for it to hold.

As far as this course is concerned, a poem is an intensely condensed piece of language, every element of which must be thought through and meaningful. Some of the building blocks we will be looking at over the next few weeks are:

Storytelling: This is the common factor linking the two parts of this course. Telling stories isn't the only thing a poem can do, but it's one of the most important. And it's a good way of transferring the skills you've already acquired in the fiction section to this one.
Imagery: Poems paint pictures. That's always been part of their job, from the earliest times: the more vivid the picture the better.
Figures of Speech: Talking about one thing in terms of another (what's often referred to as metaphor and simile) is another of the fundamental characteristics of poetry.
Form: Poems tend to be shorter than stories. The different ways you can arrange them on the page has a lot of influence on the possible meanings you can find in them.
Precision: Choosing the right word, in the right place, to give exactly the right impression to your reader is an art, not a science. But the more practice you have, the better you'll get at it.

If you feel a bit intimidated to begin with at the idea of writing a poem from scratch, that's not unusual. There are a number of exercises and suggestions in the course materials to get you started. Once you get going, though, I'm sure that you'll find it a lot less difficult than you feared.

[The Wallace Stevens Walk
(Hartford, Connecticut)]

Workshop 6

2009-05-20T08:08:00.019+12:00

[Frank O'Hara]

Week 7:

Workshop 6

Group 4: Peer Critiques
Group 4: stories returned, with corrections and provisional grades.

As well as discussing Group 4's stories, and the requirements for the Fiction Portfolio, we'll also be discussing the poems which Group 1 will have to bring along to next week's workshop.

Poetry Exercise 1: "I do this, I do that"
(Frank O'Hara)

Read Frank O'Hara's poem "The Day Lady Died" from Lunch Poems (1964). Now:
Write down a list of things you’ve done today, in the present tense, as a series of brief sentences without commentary: “I get up at 6 am / I eat breakfast / I drive to university / I get drenched by the rain / I text my friend’).
Keep going till you have fourteen (or more) such statements.
Write a set of brief, factual descriptions of the things of the day so far: “The sky is dark / the rain is cold / my friend is frowning.”
Keep going till you have fourteen (or more).
Match first to last: “I get up at 6 am my friend is frowning / I eat breakfast the rain is cold.”
Play with the results some more – cutting and pruning – until you begin to feel that you’re conveying something of the individuality of your particular day.

Cilla MacQueen’s poem “Timepiece” is another place you might go to for inspiration when writing this type of immediate, "I do this, I do that" poem (to quote O'Hara's own description of his work).

Next week:

Group 1: Workshop Poems Due. Bring sufficient copies for the entire class

All Groups: Fiction Portfolios Due Friday, 23/9/11.

Hand them in with assignment cover sheet into the assignment box on Atrium Level 2.

Please be very careful to carry out all of the assignment specifications, outlined in more detail here.

Lecture 6

2009-05-19T08:31:00.011+12:00

[Raymond Carver]

Week 6:

Lecture 6

Fiction: Meaning

Texts:

Raymond Carver, ‘Cathedral’
Bronwyn Lloyd, ‘Sink or Swim’
Tracey Slaughter, ‘Wheat’

[Tracey Slaughter: Her Body Rises (2005)]

To some extent ALL narrators are unreliable
– Wikipedia online

Sometimes an author intends for you to distrust the narrator of a story. Their account may be biassed for reasons of prejudice, ignorance, or mental instability. If this is the case, the author should clearly signal details to us which conflict with the spin the narrator is giving.

If the point of your story is the unreliability of interpretation, it’s best to choose a first-person narrator (common in 20th-century Modernism).
If the point of your story is to portray aspects of the social and physical world around us, then a third-person narrator is better (19th-century Realism).
If the point of your story is the paradoxes inherent in story-telling itself, then an (unreliable) first-person – or second-person – narrator is usual (late 20th-century Postmodernism).

What is the point of your story?

[Catherine Lacey: Unreliable Narrator]

This is the last lecture of this first section of the course, and I'm going to use it to take stock of where we’ve got to so far.

Like all Humanities courses, Creative Writing is intended to offer you new ways of engaging with ideas, and thus falls under the general heading of Critical Thinking. That's what we're always trying to teach - or, rather, encourage you to engage in yourselves. This may seem like a more subjective or impressionistic way to approach it than (say) traditional courses in logic or scientific method, but is it really?

Janet Frame used to refer to the setting for her own fictions as "Mirror City." Mirror City is a place of possibilities, of contingencies. It's where you can try out ideas and attitudes without actually having to embrace or practice them in the real world. What is it like to be a murderer? a bigot? a saint? a wage-slave? a substance-abuser? Fiction-writers use their own imaginations, as well as a good deal of research and leg-work, to persuade us that they know what those things might be like.

Sometimes they're speaking from personal experience, sometimes from the experience of others they've spoken to or interviewed, sometimes from library research, sometimes from pure extrapolation. Mostly from a mixture of the above. Are the results always convincing? No. Often they are, though. It isn't a matter of fooling readers so much as allowing them to enlarge their own sense of possibilities.

When it comes to the free flow of ideas, the combat of hypotheses and theories, creative writing - fiction and poetry in particular - might actually be seen as the ideal place to test-fly and experiment with them.

What ideas and issues are preoccupying you at present? Why not make them the focus of the new story you're composing for your portfolio? Your writing task then becomes finding the best form to express and focus these ideas, rather than formalist attempts to master the features of particular sub-genres.

Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" is (on the surface) a characteristic piece of American minimalist fiction, stocked with close, circumstantial detail. But what is it actually about? Why is this visit from the blind man to the not-particularly-happy couple significant? Maybe what it turns out to be about is what this whole course is about.

Why is it called “Cathedral”? What are the resonances of that word? Of the experience the narrator shares with Robert, his guest, as they draw on that piece of paper?

My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t really feel like I was inside anything.

“It’s really something,” I said.

[Nils Burwitz: Palma Cathedral (1984)]

Workshop 5

2009-05-18T07:27:00.011+12:00

[Waterloo Station]

Week 6:

Workshop 5

Group 3: Peer Critiques.
Group 3: stories returned, with corrections and provisional grades.
Distribute Group 4 stories.

Fiction Exercise 4: Travelling hopefully ...
(R. L. Stevenson)

James Joyce’s “Clay” is a fairytale, a parable, and a realistic story all rolled into one. It describes a character trying to make an appointment on time, then goes on to what happens to her after she arrives.
Imagine a character hurrying to get somewhere. Why? What do they hope to find there?
Put three obstacles in their way – not insurmountable problems, but little things that threaten to derail their schedule. One is a person, one some kind of machine, and the third is … something else.
Write a paragraph describing what they find when they reach their destination. Would it have been better if they’d never got there after all?
(maximum: one page – minimum: one paragraph)

[MID-SEMESTER STUDY BREAK BEGINS]
(Two Weeks)

Next session:

Group 4: Peer Critiques

Lecture 5

2009-05-17T08:23:00.007+12:00

[Angela Carter]

Week 5:

Lecture 5

Fiction: Detail

Texts:

Angela Carter, ‘The Snow Child’
Maurice Duggan, ‘A Small Story’
James Joyce, ‘Clay’

[Maurice Duggan]

God lies in the detail
– Aby Warburg

The Devil is in the details
– Proverbial

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong with the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have all been lovingly collected. If one begins with a ready-made generalization, one begins at the wrong end …
– Vladimir Nabokov

James Joyce is considered one of the great masters of modern fiction. Why? Some would say that it's because of his technical innovations: writing a whole novel (Finnegans Wake) in the language of dreams; encapsulating the action of a single day in the city of Dublin in one long, complex narrative (Ulysses).

Others (myself included) would say that it's his mastery of minutiae - the precise and telling image or word - that makes his work so rewarding to study in detail. Let's see what that means in practice:

Extracts from James Joyce’s “Clay,”
[from Dubliners (1914)]:

Maria was a very, very small person indeed, but she had a very long nose and a very long chin. She talked a little through her nose, always soothingly … [p.135]

… Maria had to laugh and say she didn’t want any ring or man either; and when she laughed her grey-green eyes sparkled with disappointed shyness and the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin. [p.136]

And Maria laughed again till the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin and till her minute body nearly shook itself asunder, because she knew that Mooney meant well, though of course she had the notions of a common woman. [p.136]

… she looked with quaint affection at the diminutive body which she had so often adorned. In spite of its years she found it a nice tidy little body. [p.136]

… she was a long time in suiting herself, and the stylish young lady behind the counter, who was evidently a little annoyed by her, asked her was it wedding-cake she wanted to buy. That made her blush and smile … [p.136]

… an elderly gentleman made room for her. He was a stout gentleman and he wore a brown hard hat; he had a square red face and a greyish moustache. Maria thought he was a colonel-looking gentleman … she thought how easy it was to know a gentleman even when he has a drop taken. [p.137]

At the thought of the failure of her little surprise and of the two and fourpence she had thrown away for nothing she nearly cried outright. [p.137]

… while they were putting on the bandage, Maria laughed and laughed again till the tip of her nose nearly met the tip of her chin. [p.138]

She felt a soft wet substance with her fingers and was surprised that nobody spoke or took off her bandage. There was a pause for a few seonds; and then a great deal of scuffling and whispering. Somebody said something about the garden … [p.138]

… and when she had ended her song Joe was very much moved …. His eyes filled up so much with tears that he could not find what he was looking for and in the end he had to ask his wife to tell him where the corkscrew was. [p.139]

[Statue of James Joyce (Dublin)]

Workshop 4

2009-05-16T08:29:00.014+12:00

[Surveillance]

Week 5:

Workshop 4

Group 2: Peer Critiques.
Group 2: stories returned, with corrections and provisional grades.
Distribute Group 3 stories.

Fiction Exercise 3: The Watcher

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't out to get you (or so the saying goes).

Imagine, for the purpose of this exercise, that someone is watching you. It could be the police, a private detective, a stalker, an ex ... even some kind of supernatural entity.
Describe the last half hour of your activities before class from your watcher's point of view.
Don't simply tell us what kind of an observer they are, but try to give us enough clues to make it possible to guess.
Should you be worried? Or is it a perfectly innocent type of surveillance?
(maximum: one page – minimum: one paragraph)

Next week:

Group 4: Workshop Story Due. Bring enough copies for the entire class

Group 3: Peer Critiques

Lecture 4

2009-05-15T09:39:00.015+12:00

[Hemingway's Spain]

Week 4:

Lecture 4

Fiction: Point of View

Texts:

Ernest Hemingway, ‘Hills Like White Elephants’
Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Doll’s House’
Patricia Grace, ‘The Lamp’

[The Doll's House]

In the last lecture we used an analogy from Art History in order to discuss the question of setting in fiction.

This time I'd like to take some ideas from Film Studies, instead.

One of the really notable differences between print and cinema as narrative media is the objectifying effect of the camera. It's very hard to prevent the camera being perceived by the audience as a transparent eye-of-God, recording what goes on in a scene clearly and without interpretation.

It can be done, of course. You can film the same scene from different angles (as Orson Welles does in Citizen Kane); you can use grainy or indistinct film-stock (the overlapping video and film cameras in The Blair Witch Project); you can move the camera through action sequences at human eye-height (the D-day landings in Saving Private Ryan; you can even film paranoid hallucinations and delusions as if they were factual events (as Ron Howard does in A Beautiful Mind). The point I'd like to make, though, is that requires ingenuity and determination to carry off even a perception of subjectivity in cinema.

Print fiction, by contrast, could be argued to be inherently subjective. There's far less disposition on the part of a reading audience to trust any narrator's version of events to be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even if they don't suspect active deceit on the part of their informant. Court testimony is always partial and one-sided; so are written accounts of complex events and feelings.

The study of point-of-view in fiction, therefore, is a study of the many ways writers have found to manage and channel this inherent untrustworthiness. If the point of your story is the information (historical, topographical, psychological) included in it, then it's important to choose as transparent as possible a method of narration. Such stories are generally told in the unlimited third-person, or a basically trustworthy first-person.

If, on the other hand, you're interested in the uncertain nature of human knowledge - the fact that we can really never know anything for sure, then it's best to choose an unreliable first-person narrator, or even (in extreme cases) a self-conscious, second-person style of storytelling.

As with setting, your choices here are essential to the overall effectiveness of your story.

Here are a few of the basic terms you'll encounter:

Narrative Point-of-View [pov]

First-person (I-based):

Call me Ishmael
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

This tells us that a person called Ishmael is going to be telling us the story. He may be the main character, or protagonist, or simply a witness to events. They will presumably be confined to what he himself has seen, and to his own interpretations (which might, however, be mistaken).

Second-person (You-based):

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought
– Italo Calvino, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (1979)

In this case the narrator and the reader are the same person. This device tends to be used in very self-conscious stories, sometimes referred to as metafictions.

Third-person (He, she or they-based)

1 - omniscient:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Also known as Eye-of-God narration. The narrator knows everything about the characters (and events) in a story. The accuracy of the account is not called into question.

2 - limited:

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face
– James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

This is a narrative centred around the experiences of one character, and confined to his or her experiences and perceptions, but actually told by an invisible narrator who chooses to recount only the thoughts and feelings of the protagonist.

[Patricia Grace (2009)]

Workshop 3

2009-05-14T08:48:00.011+12:00

[Frank Sargeson]

Week 4:

Workshop 3

Group 1: Peer Critiques.
Group 1: stories returned, with corrections and provisional grades.
Distribute Group 2 stories.

Discussion Exercise: Tracing the line of desire
(Tracey Slaughter)

Most of you have already written one story (which you’re now in the process of revising); others are still working on their first story. Each of you has another completely new one to write as well.
In pairs, go through the assigned readings to date, discussing what the main characters in each story actually desire.
Extend this “tracing the line of desire” exercise to your own story. What do your characters want, what do they need? If they don’t want or need anything, then you don’t really have a story.

Next week:

Group 3: Workshop Story Due. Bring enough copies for the entire class

Group 2: Peer Critiques

Lecture 3

2009-05-13T08:47:00.008+12:00

[Janet Frame (1924-2004)]

Week 3:

Lecture 3

Fiction: Setting

Texts:

Janet Frame, ‘The Bedjacket’
Michael Morrissey, ‘Jack Kerouac Sat Down beside the Wanganui River & Wept’
Frank Sargeson, ‘A Great Day’

In certain types of genre fiction, the setting can be more of a star than the actual characters. In Science fiction, for example, authors are often more interested in exploring the details of alien or futuristic environments than in the emotional problems of their inhabitants.

The same applies to historical novels which aim to convey a lot of factual information in a relatively painless way; also romance novels set in romantic foreign parts where the destination is more of a lure than the fairly routine personnel (tall dark stranger, innocent young girl etc.)

Certainly the amount of focus you put on your setting should be motivated by the importance it has in your story.

I guess the rule of thumb tends to be something like:

detailed background / sketchy characters

sketchy background / detailed characters

Take, for example, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa:

[La Gioconda (1503-6)]

The background is misty and understated, but almost infinitely detailed. Why? Is it his intention to distract us from the central figure in the painting? How does this assist him in conveying the mystery which so many see as underlying the mood and facial expression of his sitter?

[Turquoise Marilyn (1962)]

In Andy Warhol's multiple images of Marilyn Monroe, by contrast, the background is as empty and sketchy as can be: a simple plane of colour which can be used to motivate ever more discordant variations on the basic flesh-toned palate of a human face.

Warhol's artistic intention is clearly different from Leonardo's. Where the Madonna Lisa comes across to us a unique and intriguing individual, Marilyn Monroe appears here as a marketable, interchangeable commodity: the tinting of her portrait as arbitrary as her ersatz Hollywood screen persona.

Let's move on to how different settings operate to colour stories, though. To appreciate Michael Morrissey's "Jack Kerouac Sat Down beside the Wanganui River & Wept" fully, I think it's necessary both to have heard of the Beat writer Jack Kerouac, and to be aware of his persona as a hitchhiking drifter - as in his classic novel On the Road (1957).

[Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)]

And yet, is that enough? Isn't it also important to have some conception of the landscape of the Central North Island? Of the Wanganui / Whanganui river? To be aware also of the identity of the poet whose birthday Jack is hoping to celebrate? Isn't it the combination of setting + character which creates the plot in this case?

For the record, Jack Kerouac never visited New Zealand (or not officially, at any rate). He was dead himself by the time of James K. Baxter's funeral at Jerusalem. The story, then, is clearly not intended to be taken entirely literally - in case any of you were tempted to do so ...

[James K. Baxter (1926-1972)]

What about the other stories you've read for this session? Are they really imaginable apart from their settings? How specific do those settings have to be?

Some writers (J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis) can become so preoccupied with the backdrop and minutiae of their stories that they invent whole imaginary regions to house them. Why? What effect does this have?

I would suggest that the reasons for creating a new country (or world) to house your narrative are as various as are the reasons for putting it in some version of recognisable everyday "reality."

The question remains the same: What are the intentions of your piece as a whole, and how will the details of setting you put in help you to achieve them?

[J. R. R. Tolkien]

Imaginary Countries

NAME - LOCATION - SOURCE

Atlantis - Atlantic Ocean - Plato (360 BC)
El Dorado - South America - J. R. Freyle (1636)
Erewhon - New Zealand - Samuel Butler (1872)
Lemuria - Indian Ocean - Philip Sclater (1864)
Lilliput - Pacific Ocean - Jonathan Swift (1726)
Middle-earth - Northern Europe - J. R. R. Tolkien (c.1918-73)
Mu - Pacific Ocean - A. Le Plongeon (1873-85)
Narnia - Northern Europe - C. S. Lewis (1950-6)
Pellucidar - Earth’s Core - E. R. Burroughs (1914-63)
Shangri-La - Tibet - James Hilton (1933)
Xanadu - China - S. T. Coleridge (1797-1816)

[Imaginary Countries]

Workshop 2

2009-05-12T09:00:00.012+12:00

[Owen Marshall]

Week 3:

Workshop 2

Distribute Group 1 stories.

Fiction Exercise 2: The Twist

Owen Marshall’s “Mumsie and Zip” portrays what looks like a conventional suburban couple – then complicates the picture with a violent and shocking event.
Describe a “conventional” person (lawyer, rugby player, librarian, housewife) who – at least on the surface – conforms to stereotype.
Put them in contact with something new: an unexpected person or event.
Twist the ending. Try to surprise us with an unexpected turn that gives a new perspective on the central character
(maximum: one page – minimum: one paragraph)

Next week:

Group 2: Workshop Story Due. Bring enough copies for the entire class

Group 1: Peer Critiques

Lecture 2

2009-05-11T08:00:00.010+12:00

[C. G. Jung]

Week 2:

Lecture 2

Fiction: Character

Texts:

Owen Marshall, ‘Mumsie and Zip’
Lydia Davis, ‘Letter to a Funeral Parlor’
Tobias Wolff, ‘Bullet in the Brain’

"Character is fate"
- Novalis

Aristotle's definition of character hinges on what people do, not what they feel or think. To him, the point of drama - or, in our terms, fiction - is to put people into situations where they reveal the essential features of their character through their actions:

Aristotle’s Poetics:

One should not show worthy men passing from good fortune to bad. That does not arouse fear or pity but shocks our feelings.

Nor again wicked people passing from bad fortune to good. That is the most untragic of all, having none of the requisite qualities, since it does not satisfy our feelings or arouse pity or fear.

Nor again the passing of a thoroughly bad man from good fortune to bad fortune. Such a structure might satisfy our feelings but it arouses neither pity nor fear – pity for the undeserved misfortune, fear for the man like ourselves …

There remains then the mean between these. This is the sort of man who is not pre-eminently virtuous and just, and yet it is through no badness or villainy of his own that he falls into the fortune, but rather through some flaw in him.

There are a number of other ways of defining and accounting for various features of human character. Dominant among them (at least until the eighteenth century and the so-called "Age of Reason") was the theory of the humours, and the elements which gave rise to them:

[Humours]

The Theory of the Humours:

BLOOD - Air (hot / moist) - SANGUINE:
amorous, happy, generous
YELLOW BILE - Fire (hot / dry) - CHOLERIC:
violent, vengeful
PHLEGM - Water (cold / moist) - PHLEGMATIC:
dull, pale, cowardly
BLACK BILE - Earth (cold / dry) - MELANCHOLIC:
gluttonous, lazy, sentimental

Nowadays various theories of character proposed by psychologists have largely replaced the humours, though it's doubtful if any of them are much more than generalisations for convenience:

The Jungian Theory of Character:

Extravert or
Introvert?

Think out loud

Keep thoughts to yourself

Show energy and enthusiasm for activities

Watch first, then try task or activity

Easily distracted

Can ignore distractions

Attracted to action and activity

Like to spend time alone to get re-energized

Act before you think

Like to observe before trying things

Say things before thinking them through

Pause before answering new questions

Like variety and lots of action

Enjoy individual or small group activities

Think out loud while talking to others

Think ahead, then respond to others

At this point it's important to note that writers and psychologists have different (though overlapping) reasons for being interested in character.

Psychologists (for the most part) want to classify human beings into groups as a way of promoting understanding of common motivations and aberrations. It's a very practical necessity - a means to an end.

Fiction writers, on the other hand, are more interested in portraying the infinite variations and uniqueness inherent in human character. They stress individuality rather than the collective. This, too, is a very practical necessity of their calling. Interchangeable characters are about as interesting as sardines in the long run. Fiction needs a certain particularity to persuade us to go along with it even for a short time, let alone for the length of a whole involved plot.

Having said that, clearly different types of fiction require different emphases, when it comes to character creation.

A character like James Bond occupies a very different universe than a character like Hamlet, even though they are both the central protagonist in violent, involved dramas. "Hamlet" is about character, about the possibilities and limitations of human character in a way that (say) Goldfinger or Quantum of Solace are not.

It's not that one type of work is necessarily better than the other (though it's doubtful that people will still be enjoying Bond films in 400 years time - presumably other types of action fiction will have superseded them long since). More that there's a type of character development which is appropriate to each type - or genre - of fiction.

Let's take a look at some of the stories you've read for this week to see how different writers have approached the creation of characters from some very different viewpoints, and with some very different objectives.

[James Bonds]

Workshop 1

2009-05-10T08:29:00.016+12:00

[Martinez Roca: Beyond Lies the Wub (1989)]

Week 2:

Workshop 1

Fiction Exercise 1: Beast Fables

Leonora Carrington’s “The Debutante” and Philip K. Dick’s “ Beyond Lies the Wub” both use the device of talking animals to point out uncomfortable truths about our own civilization.
Write your own description of a talking animal - or an extraterrestrial.
Where did you meet it?
What does it want to say to you?
Is it really worth listening to? Do you listen to it?
(maximum: one page – minimum: one paragraph)

Next week:

Group 1: Workshop Stories Due. Bring enough copies for the whole class

Lecture 1

2009-05-09T09:01:00.014+12:00

[Leonora Carrington, "The Inn of the Dawn Horse" (1936-37)]

Week 1:

Lecture 1

[Course Introduction]
Fiction: What is it?

Texts:

Philip K. Dick, ‘Beyond Lies the Wub’
Vivienne Plumb, from ‘Plumb's Fables’
Leonora Carrington, ‘The Debutante’

What is this course about? What is "Creative Writing"? I think it's fair to say that you need passion and enthusiasm to write well and interestingly.

As well as passion, though, you need skills. That's the aspect we can help you with most, so that's what we'll mostly be concentrating on in this course.

Luckily the skills needed to be an effective creative writer are very similar to the skills required in many other areas.

You have to be an effective communicator, for instance.

Principles of Good Communication:

Clarity:
Make what you want to say as clear as you possibly can. If it isn’t clear to you, there’s no way it can be clear to your readers / hearers.

Audience:
What exactly is your intended audience? Children? Ten-year-olds? Intelligent, well-read adults? Fellow university students?
Detail:
Too much detail can be confusing.
Too little detail can be sketchy and unconvincing

But what do you actually want to say?

That may not be clear to you yet, but over time I guarantee that you'll find quite a number of things you'd like to communicate to other people.

So what does all that have to do with storytelling? What is a story, anyway?

I guess the question is about as meaningful as asking what a picture is, or what a piece of music is. On the one hand, the answer's obvious - on the other hand, what each of us considers to be an effective or interesting picture or piece of music is left entirely open.

Since each of you does have to produce at least two short stories in this course, though, I think the question can be rephrased as: "What constitutes a story for the purposes of this course?"

A story, then, must contain the following elements:

Plot: Something happens in the course of the narrative. What happens, how momentous or trivial it is or might seem, is up to you.
Characterisation: There needs to be at least one character in your story. What's more, your character needs to want something. He or she (or they) need to feel desire for something or someone. Again, precisely what they desire can be as trivial or momentous as you like.
Setting: The story must take place somewhere. It can be a generic cityscape, or a very particular place, described in minute detail. It can be real or imaginary, past of future, fantastic or prosaic. It can be vital to the story, or completely incidental. But it must be set somewhere.
Point-of-view: How is the story told? Is it told directly in the first person ("I did this, I did that"), or indirectly in the third person ("he walked down the long corridor alone")? Or have you switched to second person ("you wake up. Was it just a dream?). All these choices have implications on the effect your story will have on its readers.
Detail: Your story can be more or less detailed in its approach to the characters and settings you describe. The nature of the story should dictate just how much (or how little) detail you need.
Meaning: What does it all mean? Why are you telling us this particular story? Does it have an obvious moral, or is the purpose just to give us an idea of what it's like to experience the world the way you experience it?

As far as the course prescriptions go, your story should be:

between 1,000 and 2, 000 words long (if you want to go over that limit, you'll need to get specific clearance for that from your tutor)
in any genre or style you like: Sci Fi, Romance, Detective - all are possiblities, as well as realist or autobiographical fiction (though reality and your own experience of it might be a good place to start your story writing: how many of us have actually been to another planet or met a ghost - or a talking animal, for that matter?)
based on one of the exercises only if you want to do that. The exercises are designed to be from a paragraph to a page long. It can be very difficult to spin some of them out even to 1,000 words if they don't hugely interest you to start with.

So let's begin with plot.

What do the critics have to say about it?

[Raphael: Aristotle]

Aristotle’s Poetics (c.335 BC):

The plot … is the first principle and as it were the soul of tragedy: character comes second.

Plots … must have length but must be easily taken in by the memory.

A plot does not have unity … simply because it deals with a single hero. Many and indeed innumerable things happen to an individual, some of which do not go to make up any unity …

The plot … must represent a single piece of action and the whole of it; and the component incidents must be so arranged that if one of them be transposed or removed, the unity of the whole is dislocated and destroyed. For if the presence or absence of a thing makes no visible difference, then it is not an integral part of the whole.

[Edgar Allan Poe]

Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846):

It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation ...

Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone – whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone – afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect. …

There is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art – the limit of a single sitting …

[Comedy & Tragedy]

Assignments

2009-05-08T08:29:00.018+12:00

[Henri Silberman: Central Park (1961)]

Assessment

This is a 15 credit paper, 100 % internally assessed. This is how the marks are divided up:

The Fiction Portfolio: 40 %
consisting of
1 New Story: 10 percent
1 Revised Class Story: 10 percent
2 Completed Class Exercises: 10 percent
1 Reflection Essay: 10 percent

The Poetry Portfolio: 40 %
consisting of
1 New Poem: 10 percent
1 Revised Class Poem: 10 percent
2 Completed Class Exercises: 10 percent
1 Reflection Essay: 10 percent

Workshop Critiques: 10 %

Workshop Participation: 10 %

= 100 %

NB: Both the fiction and the poetry portfolios are compulsory parts of the assessment. You must have them accepted for grading in order to be eligible to pass the course.

You are also required to have attended sufficient classes throughout the semester to receive a participation grade from your tutor.

The two in-class critiques are, however, not compulsory. If you miss either (or both) of them you will simply lose the grades for that assignment.

The Fiction Portfolio

Your portfolio must include the following four components:

New story

This is a completely new story written as a response to everything you’ve learnt in the course to date.

It can be, but does not have to be based on one of the fiction exercises in the course. As with your class story, you may not base it on an exercise included elsewhere in your portfolio.

[A note on length: Both of the stories you submit should be between 1,000 and 2,000 words long. Don’t go beyond that length unless you really feel you have to – and have received permission from your tutor.]

Revision of class story

This is a revision of the story you originally copied and distributed to your tutorial group. Be sure to attach the marked copy handed back to you by your tutor to the text of the new version.

If you fail to do so, your story will automatically have half the possible number of marks deducted.

You don’t have to have followed the suggestions and feedback offered to you by your classmates or tutor but you should show evidence of having at least considered them ((but the story you submit can still be only 1,000-2,000 words long).

[A note on revision: Changing a few words and some punctuation does not constitute substantial revision. Re-vision your original idea – make it new. This is a rewrite rather than a light edit. If you submit more or less the same story discussed in class, your tutor has already given you an indication of the grade it will probably receive.]

Two completed exercises

These could be any of the four Fiction Exercises started in class and completed at home. In this section of the portfolio you must follow the exercise instructions precisely. You may not include any exercise which you’ve used as the basis for either of your two short stories (1. and 2. above).

[A note on length: The two exercises you submit should be only between a paragraph and a page long, as specified in the rubric for each. Don’t go beyond that length. Please be careful to indicate which exercises you've done.]

Reflection Essay

In no more than two pages, you should discuss the process you went through in writing one of your two stories, either 1. The new story or 2. The class story. You may not discuss either of the short exercises included under 3 above. You should also make close reference to the story in the anthology that yours is based on.

Your choice of stories to discuss in this essay will therefore be limited by the fact that the one you choose has to have been prompted in some way by one of the stories in the Book of Readings.

NB: If you omit either half of this exercise: the discussion of your own story or of the one in the Book of Readings, you can expect to be marked out of 5 rather than 10.

The Poetry Portfolio

Your portfolio must include the following four components:

New poem

This is an entirely new poem inspired either by one of the poems in the anthology, or written independently, or written as a response to one of the exercises (though – as with the class poem – this cannot be based on an exercise included elsewhere in your portfolio).

[A note on length: Each of the poems and poetry exercises you submit for grading in this course should be at least 14 lines long, with the sole exception of haiku. If you include haiku in your portfolio, either as a poem or an exercise, you must provide at least three of them (either linked, or as three individual three-line poems).]

Revision of class poem

Be careful to attach the original marked copy of the poem handed back to you by your tutor. If you fail to do so, your poem will automatically have half the possible number of marks deducted.

You don’t have to have followed the suggestions and feedback offered to you by your classmates or tutor but you should show evidence of having at least considered them (again, the poem needs to be at least 14 lines long).

[A note on revision: Changing a few words and some punctuation does not constitute substantial revision. Re-vision your original idea – make it new. This is a rewrite rather than a light edit. If you submit more or less the same poem you already read in class, your tutor has already given you an indication of the grade it will probably receive.]

Two completed exercises

These could be any two of the four Poetry Exercises started in class. You don’t need to attach your drafts and working notes – just a complete version of each exercise. In this section of the portfolio you must follow the exercise instructions precisely. Please also indicate which exercise it is that you've done.

You may not include any exercise which you’ve used as the basis for one of your two poems (1. and 2. above).

Reflection Essay

In no more than two pages, you should discuss the process you went through in writing one of the two poems, either 1. The new poem or 2. The class poem, included in your portfolio. You may not discuss either of the exercises included under 3 above. You should also make close reference to the poem in the anthology that yours is based on.

Your choice of poems to discuss in this essay will therefore be limited by the fact that the one you choose has to have been prompted in some way by one of the poems in the Book of Readings.

NB: If you omit either half of this exercise: the discussion of your own poem or the one from the Book of Readings, you can expect to be marked out of 5 rather than 10.

Workshop Critiques

Each person will get a turn at critiquing someone else’s work twice in the semester.

How should you go about preparing for this critique? Well, start off by making some notes about the poem and story in question:
Is the overall point of it clear to you?
What is that overall point?
Are there any details you particularly liked / disliked?
Why?
Did you enjoy reading it?
Why / why not?
What are some specific ways the author might go about improving it?
Are there any further questions you would like to ask the author?

You will be assessed on how well you lead a discussion on this poem/ story, not just on the content of your notes, so come prepared to speak, not just to read out details from a piece of paper …

Workshop Participation

You will be marked here on how constructively and consistently you have taken part in class discussions and activities during the semester.

NB: There are no marks for attendance as such, since you are expected to be at every session in any case. Repeated, unexplained absences will lead to marks being deducted, however, as will a failure to come to class with the materials required for a particular lecture or workshop.

There will be a lot of demands made on your organizational abilities in this course. Think ahead, and always come prepared.

Course Timetable

2009-05-07T08:52:00.015+12:00

[Carl Spitzweg: The Poor Poet (1835)]

2011

Semester 2 (18/7-21/10/11)

Lecture:

Wed 2-3 pm [SNW200]

Workshops:

Mon 12-2 pm [AT7]
Tues 1-3 pm [AT6]
Wed 9-11 am [QB8]
Wed 3-5 pm [SC2 / QB1 / QB7]
Thurs 10-12 [SC2]
Fri 11-1 pm [AT7]

Week 1

Wed (20/7): Lecture 1
Course Introduction: Fiction - What is it?

Texts:
Philip K. Dick, ‘Beyond Lies the Wub’
Vivienne Plumb, ‘from Plumb's Fables’
Leonora Carrington, ‘The Debutante’

Workshop assignment in lecture

Week 2

Wed (27/7): Lecture 2
Fiction: Character

Texts:
Owen Marshall, ‘Mumsie and Zip’
Lydia Davis, ‘Letter to a Funeral Parlor’
Tobias Wolff, ‘Bullet in the Brain’

Workshop 1

Week 3

Wed (3/8): Lecture 3
Fiction: Setting

Texts:
Janet Frame, ‘The Bedjacket’
Michael Morrissey, ‘Jack Kerouac Sat Down beside the Wanganui River and Wept’
Frank Sargeson, ‘A Great Day’

Workshop 2
Group 1: Workshop stories due.

Week 4

Wed (10/8): Lecture 4
Fiction: Point of View

Texts:
Ernest Hemingway, ‘Hills Like White Elephants’
Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Doll’s House’
Patricia Grace, ‘The Lamp’

Workshop 3
Group 1: Peer critiques.
Group 1: stories returned, with corrections and provisional grades.
Group 2: Workshop stories due.

Week 5

Wed (17/8): Lecture 5
Fiction: Detail

Texts:
Angela Carter, ‘The Snow Child’
Maurice Duggan, ‘A Small Story’
James Joyce, ‘Clay’

Workshop 4
Group 2: Peer critiques.
Group 2: stories returned, with corrections and provisional grades.
Group 3: Workshop stories due.

Week 6

Wed (24/8): Lecture 6
Fiction: Meaning

Texts:
Raymond Carver, ‘Cathedral’
Bronwyn Lloyd, ‘Sink or Swim’
Tracey Slaughter, ‘Wheat’

Workshop 5
Group 3: Peer critiques.
Group 3: stories returned, with corrections and provisional grades.
Group 4: Workshop stories due.

[MID-SEMESTER BREAK]
(29/8-9/9)

Week 7

Wed (14/9): Lecture 7
Poetry: What is it?

Texts:
W. H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux-Arts’
Michael Jackson, ‘Green Turtle’
Cilla McQueen, ‘Timepiece’
Marianne Moore, ‘Poetry’
Frank O'Hara, ‘The Day Lady Died’
Kendrick Smithyman, ‘Peter Durey’s Story’
Wallace Stevens, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’

Workshop 6
Group 4: Peer critiques.
Group 4: stories returned, with corrections and provisional grades.

Week 8

Wed (21/9): Lecture 8
Poetry: Storytelling

Texts:
Fleur Adcock, ‘Camping’
Stu Bagby, ‘First Dance’
Michael Jackson, ‘Sudan’
Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘Elegy for a School Mate’
Sylvia Plath, ‘The Thin People' (1981 / 2000)
Ezra Pound, ‘The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’

Workshop 7
Group 1: Workshop poems due.

Fiction Portfolios Due
(Friday, 23rd September)

Week 9

Wed (28/9): Lecture 9
Poetry: Imagery

Texts:
Matsuo Bashō, ‘Haiku’
Amy Brown, ‘Siamang’
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, ‘Home from Hospital’
Ruth Dallas, ‘Pioneer Woman with Ferrets’
Scott Hamilton, ‘1918’
Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1911 / 1913)
--,‘from Lustra’

Workshop 8
Group 1: Peer critiques.
Group 1: poems returned, with corrections and provisional grades.
Group 2: Workshop poems due.

Week 10

Wed (5/10): Lecture 10
Poetry: Figures of Speech

Texts:
W. H. Auden, ‘Brussels in Winter’ (1938 / 1966)
Kevin Ireland, ‘Cloud’
Thérèse Lloyd, ‘In Levin’
Deborah Pope, ‘ Getting Through’
Jack Ross, ‘Coromandel’
William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnets 130 & 138’

Workshop 9
Group 2: Peer critiques.
Group 2: poems returned, with corrections and provisional grades.
Group 3: Workshop poems due.

Week 11

Wed (12/10): Lecture 11
Poetry: Form

Texts:
Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’
e. e. cummings, ‘l(a’
Allen Curnow, ‘The Game of Tag’
Matt Harris, ‘Pathoscape’
Peter Reading, ‘from Perduta gente’
Hone Tuwhare, ‘cummings’
Sonja Yelich, ‘narrow neck from the boat ramp’

Workshop 10
Group 3: Peer critiques.
Group 3: poems returned, with corrections and provisional grades.
Group 4: Workshop poems due.

Week 12

Wed (19/10): Lecture 12
Poetry: Precision

Texts:
James K. Baxter, ‘from Jerusalem Sonnets’
Janet Charman, ‘injection’
Grant Duncan, ‘April without her’
Anne Kennedy, ‘One of my Honolulu Sonnets’
Robert Lowell, ‘Skunk Hour’
Eugenio Montale, ‘Montale's Sunflower’
C. K. Stead, ‘from The Masks of Catullus’
Derek Walcott, ‘from The Schooner Flight’

Workshop 11
Group 4: Peer critiques
Group 4: poems returned, with corrections and provisional grades.

Poetry Portfolios Due
(Friday, 28th October)

[Mind Closed]

Course Requirements

2009-05-06T08:24:00.018+12:00

[Tom Gauld and Simone Lia: The Writer at Work (2002)]

Presentation

All the work you hand in should adhere to the following guidelines:
Typed: computer printouts, electric or manual typewriters are all acceptable; handwritten work is not.
1½ or double-spaced text.
Written on one side only of A4 sheets
12 or 14-point type: smaller or larger is unacceptable
Margins at least 2.5 cm (1 inch) all around (including top and bottom)

Marking

You will be graded not on the quality of the experience or feelings you describe in your writing (whether poetry or prose), but on:
how well it meets the assignment requirements
how effective it is as a piece of writing
the clarity with which you communicate the ideas lying behind your work
Presentation and grammar are also very important. Hastily thrown-together, sloppily formatted work is unlikely to achieve a good grade.

Grading of creative work can be particularly sensitive. If you disagree with a mark, we suggest that you wait for a few days before talking to us about it. Give yourself that much time to reread and reflect on the grade and the comments. If you still have a query or complaint after that, you should consult your tutor first of all. If you are still dissatisfied, you may contact me.

Late Assignments

All work is due in on the dates given in the Course Timetable.

Submit your assignments through the assignment slot in Atrium level 2 (or to your tutor in the Workshop).

Assignments may also be submitted online through the course Stream site to establish the date of completion, but they must always be accompanied by a hardcopy version handed in to the School as soon as possible afterwards.
NB: Electronic texts of assignments or exercises will not be printed out for you by your tutor or lecturer, or by the School secretaries.
Late work, without an extension, will incur a penalty of one mark per day.

If it is more than one week late, your tutor may refuse to accept or grade it.

Extensions

If you want an extension, you must ask for one from your tutor. They will be given sparingly, in cases of bereavement, illness, or family crisis. You will be asked to provide medical certificates for illness.

You must ask for the extension before the assignment is due.

E-mail Communication

E-mail should be used only:
to request an extension on an assignment.
NB: This may or may not be granted. You are not guaranteed a favourable response.

to explain an absence from class.
NB:You must provide a medical certificate if it is health-related. If you fail to provide a satisfactory excuse, it will continue to be counted against you as an unexplained absence.

Use of Laptop Computers in Class

No laptop may be used in any lecture, tutorial or workshop in this paper without the prior permission of the lecturer or tutor. That permission will be limited to cases of actual need (RSI problems or other disabilities).

Plagiarism

We take plagiarism extremely seriously. If you take all or part of someone else’s work without acknowledgement and present it as your own, you can expect to receive – at the very least – a zero grade for that assignment.

Depending on the seriousness of the offence, you may also face failure in the course as a whole.

If in doubt, ask. Not only your words, but also the plots and ideas you employ must be your own unaided work.

[The Poet's Loft (Marin County)]

Course Description

2009-05-05T12:46:00.007+12:00

[Rembrandt: The Anatomy Lesson (1632)]

What is this course about?

Be concise; get to the point; be clear on what you want to say.

The course is called Creative Writing, and that’s what we’ll be concentrating on. However, I should make a couple of comments before we begin.

Our primary focus throughout will be on ideas and how to communicate them clearly and effectively. It is in this respect that this paper lines up with others in the Humanities.

Stories and poems, the two specific forms of writing we’ll be working with, have always been considered particularly potent ways of getting thoughts and information across. It’s how to promote that exchange of meaning that we’ll be concentrating on in the course, rather than the fostering of “creativity” in itself. That (hopefully) each of us was born with. Clear communication can be taught.

Whether you’re an English major, a Communications major, a Media Studies major, a Psychology major, or you haven’t yet decided what to specialize in, I can promise that this course will be relevant to your other studies. As well as teaching you techniques for expressing your own ideas in poetry and fiction, it will help you to analyze and understand other people’s work in greater depth.

If your interest is in Communication specifically, it will also help you to see the issues involved in choosing a medium of communication. Advertisers, PR people, News Reporters and Creative Artists all face essentially the same dilemma: how to reach a target audience with a particular message in the shortest possible time.

What are our learning objectives?

The paper aims to:
Explore the processes involved in writing poetry and short stories.
Teach the fundamental elements of craft, such as metaphor, structure and plot.
Facilitate your own close reading of published poetry and fiction.
Hone your practice as a creative writer.
Accustom you to providing and receiving workshop feedback.

What am I expected to do each week?

You will attend one hour-long lecture and one two-hour workshop every week.

To prepare for the lecture, you should read the group of poems or stories from the Course Anthology that are prescribed for that particular session (for further details, see the Course Timetable).

In the workshop there will be further discussion of these readings, and you will also be expected to bring along any writing homework set for that week.

Attendance at both lectures and workshops is compulsory. A roll will be taken at each workshop and a clipboard will be handed around at lectures. Make sure that you sign this, as it is the only record of your attendance.

More than four unexplained absences from workshops may be taken as grounds for failure in the course; consistent absence from lectures will be reflected in your participation grade.

How are the workshops organised?

Each tutorial will be divided into groups. The members of each group must bring along enough copies of their stories / poems for the whole group, and distribute them the week before they are scheduled to be discussed (see the timetable on p.15).

Your tutor will give you back a copy of your story / poem with annotations and a provisional grade. It will not, however, be given a final mark until it is resubmitted, in revised form, in your portfolio.

Each story / poem will be critiqued by one of the members of that particular group: person A discussing person B’s story / poem, person B person C’s, person C person D’s, and so on round to person D talking about person A’s story / poem (see Workshop Critiques on the Assignments page for details).

What is good lecture etiquette?

All lectures and workshops begin at on the hour and continue till ten to the hour.
Please be punctual. If you arrive late, try to take a seat as quietly and unobtrusively as possible.
If you know you will have to leave early (for whatever reason), try to inform your lecturer of this in advance. Avoid disruption to other students by sitting at the end of a row. Try to close the door quietly as you go out.
If you are expecting an urgent phonecall and need to keep your cellphone on, you must clear this with your lecturer in advance. Otherwise, all cellphones should be turned off at all times. If you forget, and it rings by mistake, don't answer it.
Don't talk unless there's a class discussion underway. Make sure your remarks are addressed to the group as a whole, not your immediate neighbour.

What are the protocols of a writing workshop?

Be courteous and supportive of each other – constructively critical, not negative.
Be honest. Don’t give out praise or blame if you don’t really mean it.
Make no introductions to or apologies for the piece of work you are reading out. Let it speak for itself.
Don’t refuse to read your work out week after week or it will become an increasingly frightening prospect.

[Frank Sargeson's bach (2006)]

Welcome

2008-04-14T08:52:00.032+12:00

[Planet Stories (1952)]

Welcome to 139.123: Creative Writing at Massey Albany.

This year, 2011, the course will be taught by Dr Jack Ross (course convenor), with the help of tutors Jo Emeney, Vivienne Lingard, Dr Bronwyn Lloyd, Kelly Malone & Orchid Tierney.

So what exactly does the term "Creative Writing" cover, in this particular case? Here's what's up on the Massey University website:

Paper Number:
139.123

Paper Title:
Creative Writing

Credit Value:
15 credits

Calendar Prescription:
An exploration of the processes involved in writing poetry and short stories. Students learn the fundamental elements of craft, such as metaphor, structure and plot, through the close reading of published poetry and fiction, through their own practice as creative writers, and through providing and receiving workshop feedback.

This paper teaches the fundamentals necessary to craft original poems and short literary fiction. Since good writing requires good reading, we will take apart excellent poems and stories to see what makes them tick: We’ll investigate what a poem is by exploring such elements of craft as image. metaphor, and form, and become better readers of fiction by attending to such techniques as character, plot, and point of view. Throughout, we’ll work closely with the “body” of language, learning to use it more fully than most people do. With all of this in mind, you will write and revise your own poems and stories and, along the way, learn to give helpful feedback to other writers.

The main goal of this paper is to help you develop as a writer. A related aim is to show you that creative writing is a skill like many others, one that can be improved with attention, effort, and, most of all, substantial and serious revision.

Pre and co requisites:
None

Semester:
Semester 2

Campus:
Auckland (Albany)

Mode:
Internal

E-Learning Category:
S (Stream-supported)

Paper coordinator:
Dr. Jack Ross
School of English and Media Studies
Atrium Building Level L2.32
Albany Campus
Phone: 414 0800 x 9506
Email: j.r.ross@massey.ac.nz

Teaching Timetable (internal only):
Please see http://publictimetable.massey.ac.nz/ for timetabling information

Learning Outcomes:
The main goal of this paper is to help you develop as a writer. A related aim is to show you that creative writing is a skill like many others, one that can be improved with attention, effort, and, most of all, substantial and serious revision.

Major Topics:
We cover the major elements of poetry and fiction: image, metaphor, denotation and connotation, plot, character, point of view, and structure.

Assessment Proportions:
Internal Assessment: 100%.

Description of Assessment Activities:
You will read poems and stories and, using these as models, write poems, stories, and short essays reflecting on your work and that of your peers.

Due Dates / Deadlines:
The due dates for assignments (and any other internal assessment components) will be advised at the start of the semester.

Penalties for late assignment submission:
Work accepted up to one week late with a penalty of 10 points.

Assignment turnaround:
Three weeks.

Any specific requirements for passing the paper:
None.

Principal Textbook:
School Anthology of Readings, available from Student Notes in the basement of Quad B.

Recommended:
Diana Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual, 4th or 5th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Disclaimer:
The information contained in this paper outline is correct as of 8 April 2010. Any changes will be notified to students at the beginning of the paper.

I'd also like to invite any of you who'd like to be a class representative for 139.123 this semester to visit the Albany Student's Association site here and sign up online. There are details there about the duties, the training session, and so on, but the main point is that even if there's already a Student Rep for the paper, we can always do with another - the more the merrier, in fact.

You should also check out the Student Learning Centre's website. They run a variety of useful courses on this campus which you may wish to attend.