Exercise 4: Learning through Imitation

These are the instructions for Exercise 4.  Post #2 on the blog.

1.  Choose an author you admire from this class.  Find an aspect of the story’s technique that you admire.  Some examples:

            the flow of dialogue

            the way setting adds to your understanding of the story

            the way an author uses narration to seamlessly go from one scene to another

            the way a character is able to have many characters in a story without confusing the reader.

2. On the blog, identify the story and writer and post a 1-2 paragraph analysis of how the technique is used.

3.  Choose a 1-2 pp. scene from your own story or from an exercise, and rewrite it in the style of the author.  You can rewrite it from scratch, or use some of what you have and boldface any changes you’ve made from the original.  Type 2-3 sentences explaining the changes you made, at the end of the scene, and print this out (not a blog post) and bring it to class. 

Questions for Teddy Steinkellner on the first part of his novel, "Trash Can Days," his time as a Stanford undergraduate, his writing process, the publication process, etc.

This is Teddy's first book, a YA novel titled "Trash Can Days."  Post a couple of questions here for Teddy.

Comments on "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"

Comment on any aspect of the story that interests you.

Photo of the revision session! Also, a photo of a bear Shimon saw over the weekend.

Thoughts on "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" and "Beginners"

Responses to the story and the edits.  Whatever strikes your fancy!

Thoughts on "Who's Irish?"

Open-ended blog response....1-2 paragraph reaction to the story.

Thoughts on "Prowler" (in the reader)

Feel free to range away from this topic, but a prompt that I will call optional:
Q:  How does Tallent use the spaces in the story to affect the characters and the trajectory of the story?

Thoughts on "Girl" and "Boys"

No prompt.  Feel free to remark on an aspect of the stories that intrigued you.

Bad metaphors

1. Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.

2. He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.

3. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

4. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

5. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

6. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

7. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

8. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

9. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

10. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

11. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

12. The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.

13. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

14. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

15. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at asolar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

16. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

17. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

18. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

19. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

20. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

21. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

22. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

23. Even in his last years, Grand pappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

24. He felt like he was being hunted down like a dog, in a place that hunts dogs, I suppose.

25. She was as easy as the TV Guide crossword.

26. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

27. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

28. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

29. “Oh, Jason, take me!” she panted, her breasts heaving like a college freshman on $1-a-beer night.

30. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

31. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

32. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

33. The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.

34. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.

35. Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like “Second Tall Man.”

36. The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.

37. The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.

38. She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.

39. Her pants fit her like a glove, well, maybe more like a mitten, actually.

40. Fishing is like waiting for something that does not happen very often.

41. They were as good friends as the people on “Friends.”

42. Oooo, he smells bad, she thought, as bad as Calvin Klein’s Obsession would smell if it were called Enema and was made from spoiled Spamburgers instead of natural floral fragrances.

43. The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.

44. He was as bald as one of the Three Stooges, either Curly or Larry, you know, the one who goes woo woo woo.

45. The sardines were packed as tight as the coach section of a 747.

46. Her eyes were shining like two marbles that someone dropped in mucus and then held up to catch the light.

47. The baseball player stepped out of the box and spit like a fountain statue of a Greek god that scratches itself a lot and spits brown, rusty tobacco water and refuses to sign autographs for all the little Greek kids unless they pay him lots of drachmas.

48. I felt a nameless dread. Well, there probably is a long German name for it, like Geschpooklichkeit or something, but I don’t speak German. Anyway, it’s a dread that nobody knows the name for, like those little square plastic gizmos that close your bread bags. I don’t know the name for those either.

49. She was as unhappy as when someone puts your cake out in the rain, and all the sweet green icing flows down and then you lose the recipe, and on top of that you can’t sing worth a damn.

50. Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

51. It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.

52. Bob was as perplexed as a hacker who means to access T:flw.quid55328.com\aaakk/ch@ung but gets T:\flw.quidaaakk/ch@ung by mistake.

53. You know how in “Rocky” he prepares for the fight by punching sides of raw beef? Well, yesterday it was as cold as that meat locker he was in.

54. The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.

55. Her lips were red and full, like tubes of blood drawn by an inattentive phlebotomist.

56. The sunset displayed rich, spectacular hues like a .jpeg file at 10 percent cyan, 10 percent magenta, 60 percent yellow and 10 percent black.

Thoughts on "The Frog Prince"

No prompt this time; find an aspect of the story that grabs your attention and describe in 1-2 paragraphs.

Thoughts on "The Ice Man" and "The Relive Box"

Post 1-2 paragraphs reactions on any part of the readings you find intriguing. 

Thoughts on Alice Munro's "Gravel"

Choose one aspect of craft (character, point of view, dialogue, scene--or something else, like setting or plot) and comment on how you found Alice Munro using it in the story.  Reference at least one specific scene or line.

Tom Kealey's "From Bremerton" and "Thieves I've Known"

This blog post is in two parts:  1) discuss one aspect of either of the stories that intrigued you, and 2) ask two questions you would be curious about hearing from him.  One of these can be about his writing process, but the other should be related to the stories themselves.

James Salter's "Bangkok"

Prompt:  Choose one line of dialogue you found particularly intriguging, and explain how it reveals something about one or both of the characters and/or their relationship.

Thoughts on "The Semplica-Girl Diaries" and "Sonny's Blues"

Question:  Choose the point-of-view character from one of these stories.  What are the limitations of his perspective, and how do those limitations contribute to the tension in the story?

Point of View

Read the entry on Point of View in the back of the reader.

Read the entry in the back of the course reader on point of view.  Write a 1 paragraph scene describing a character from the 3rd-person limited point of view.  Post on the blog by 5 p.m. Friday.  

Then, choose your partner's scene and rewrite it in 1st person.  Keep in mind that the location shouldn’t change with the different points of view, but the description of the scene will.  

NOTE: Post this as a comment on your partner’s post by class time on Monday.

Thoughts on "The Hull Case" and "Gorse is Not People"

Q:  How does the choice of POV affect the telling of these stories?

Thoughts on "The Short, Happy Life of Francies Macomber" and "Brownies."

Q: What is the most memorable scene out of these two stories for you, and what makes it so memorable?

Assignment 2: a closer look at a memorable character

Instructions:  Find a character in a story that you’ve read before that you found compelling.  This can be a main character, an antagonist, or even a secondary character.  If it’s a short story, try to track it down and reread it.  If it’s a novel, you can look at the way the character is introduced, or how he or she is portrayed in a  crucial scene.  Write a 2-3 paragraph analysis on the blog (comment under this post) on what makes that character compelling. You don’t have to provide a description of the story—just enough to get an idea of the character in the context of the story.

Responses to "Bullet in the Brain" and "Birdsong"

Prompt:  Which character was the most compelling out of the two stories, and why?  What makes for a compelling character?