Derek had assigned us all to groups for peer and professor review of our Narrative Essay Proposals. These are notes for the 2nd (9:25am) and 3rd (9:50am) which were conducted at the same time.
Derek's Tips:
Titles are like Staples: they show proof of review & evaluation of your work.
Break up assignments into smaller chunks over a long period of time, this gives time for the unconscious brain to click in and provide feedback.
Our Next Step:
take 5-10 minutes
sketch out / visualize the story arch.
map where you plan to establish the complication, paragraph breaks and the climax.
take 10-30 minutes
sketch out a Vertical Plan/Outline of the story broken into separate paragraphs. include the following:
main ideas, connection between main ideas, which characters include "invisible" characters (i.e. the waiter, the bus driver etc.), main interactions / actions (i.e. an argument, break up), type of language vocab and tone you plan to use (i.e. funny, tragic, violent etc.)
Begin writing paragraph
- Write one paragraph by next class.
- Use this to establish the style for rest of paragraphs
- Try writing the easiest paragraph first.
- Recognize total # of paragraphs to determine word count for individual paragraphs.
- Dialogue is not a part of the curriculum & requires a different writing style which must be done correctly.
- If you wish to use dialogue in your assignment research how to do it correctly
- Avoid abstraction, focus on hard details
- Stay believable, within reality
- Keep background details in the background
- Reader must stay with the protagonist, if the reader can predict what will happen the story becomes boring.
- If you have a specific/unique setting the reader might not me familiar. Tone and choice of details is important.
Derek will review our assignments as we work on them if you ask him. Only bring one paragraph at a time, this is enough for him to get a feel for your work.
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