English 221: Intro to Creative Writing
Agenda: January 31

• Little Red Riding Hood & Handout: Notes on the Reading Response
• Quiz #3: Strunk and White Chapter 1
• In Class Writing: The Idea Engine
• Group Work: Billy Collins’s “Snow Day” (on back)

For Next Time: 2/5

READ: IW Chapter 2: pages 37-49 & William Trevor’s story: “Sitting with the Dead”
WRITE: A 2-3 page Reading Response on Voice, employing the terms: author, narrator, character, distance, and very importantly:

Point of View:

• Who is speaking? Who is telling the story?
• To whom? The reader? another character? To themselves?
• At what distance? An old man telling the story of his youth? (the distance here has to do with time) A prisoner recounting his crime? (the distance here has to do with personal relationship to the story) A neighbor recounting the trouble of a family down the block? (again, personal relationships to the story) A dispassionate observer, seemingly without any stake in the outcome?
• With what limitations? Is the narrator a child? A liar? Crazy?
• Why do you think the author chose this Point of View? What are the advantages of this point of view? What are the disadvantages?

First Person, Second Person, Third Person—omniscient, limited, and objective. Point of View is not synonymous with opinion, as in “From my point of view, George Bush is a homicidal maniac.” Point of View can be described objectively. Who tells the story? Whose thoughts does the reader have access to?  How much does the narrator know? Is the narrator reliable? What effect is gained by the choice of this narrator? What if the story were told by someone else? For example: imagine the story "Little Red Riding Hood" from:

• Little Red's point of view
• the wolf's point of view
• the wolf’s wife’s point of view
• the wolf’s older brother’s point of view
• Granny’s point of view
• an animal biologists' point of view

In other words, how does the choice of narrator shape the story?

The Idea Engine

Writers draw upon all sorts of strange and various things for inspiration—memories, observations, snatches of conversation, odd objects, newspaper articles, dreams. But many beginning writers believe that they must have some big, profound idea in order to justify the poem or essay or story they hope to write. My experience is that the bigger or more profound the idea at the beginning, the greater the chance that it won’t come to anything. The Idea Engine is intended to help amass ideas for later development. The Idea Engine helps to establish a writing practice that focuses on process. Bill Watterson, at the end of his sophomore year at Kenyon, painted over the Sistine Chapel on his ceiling. He didn’t paint it because he wanted it to last forever. He painted it because he wanted to paint it. So don’t expect that all of these will come to some beautiful fruition.

Here’s a list:

Something you found (a real object)

Something you lost (a real object)
Someone you’ve lost touch with (a real person)

The worst job you’ve ever had

A person you met only once

A place you want to return to

Choose one of the above. Or, add your own prompt to the list. Freewrite about this in your journal for fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes may not seem like a long time, but… Try hard to not let your pen or pencil lift up from the page. Keep it moving. If you have to write, “blah, blah, blah, I kind of hate this, blah blah, my brother’s baseball glove, my brother’s baseball glove…” go ahead and do that for a while. Don’t stop.

There are no rules on form: you can write a description, a free-association list of words, a dialogue, a plot outline, a scene, an anecdote, a reflection. When you’re done, give what you’ve written a snappy, temporary, title.

Group Work: Imagery

All of the following terms are the critical vocabulary from Chapter One which you need to understand, remember, and employ in both discussion and in responses throughout the semester.

Group 1: 1-5 Group 2: 6-10 Group 3: 11-15 Group 4: 16-19
Identify the terms above as they are used in “Snow Day”. Confer. Reach consensus. Report.