English 221: Intro to Creative Writing
Agenda: March 6

• More discussion of Missing
• Swap First Drafts
  • Read through the draft once, without a pen in hand. Experience the story, essay or poem, without judgment.
  • When you're finished, write on the back an answer to this simple question: What is it about?
  • Read it again,with a pen in your hand. This time, in the margins, feel free to make notes: Nice image or great dialogue or good description or Funny or great transition or good characterization .  When I like something in a draft, I usually put a checkmark by it.  In your margin notes, you can heap on the praise and good will and fellowship. 
  • when you've finished with the second read, on the back, freewrite answer these questions:
    • How do you relate to this piece? What does it remind you of?
    • What effect on the reader does it seem to want to produce?
    • What is it trying to say about what it is about?
    • Does the piece give all the basic orienting facts and context necessary for the reader to understand it? If not, what's missing?
    • What questions do you have that the piece does not yet answer?  What suggestions can you make that would move this draft closer to what it really wants to be about?  What craft areas might be developed that would make the draft stronger and more compelling?  (A more precise image, a characterization more complexly drawn; a scene written that's only suggested; a scene expanded; the setting better described; an object or metaphor put to further use.)  What if...

FOR NEXT TIME: 3/11

WRITE: Choose two more entries that you starred in Exercise 6.1. Make the commitment to make these into drafts of a story, essay, or poem. Type out both entries as your first rough draft of a poem, story or essay. For Tuesday 3/11, you must have a typed rough draft of each of the three genres: story, essay, poem. Bring two copies of each to class. One to share with a peer. The other to turn into to me. Maximum page length: 3 pages.