Event Invitation: Sven Birkerts Reading

When: Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 7:00 p.m.
Where: The Board of Trustees Room, Administration Building (ADM 305)

Scholar, critic, writer, and editor, Sven Birkerts, is FAU's inaugural Lawrence A. Sanders Writer-in-Residence. He will be delivering a reading/talk, "Memoir: Account and Accountability," and we're invited!

IN-CLASS EXERCISE: Secrets

Your character's secrets tell much about how they are and how they will act in your narrative. Take a spin on Post Secret .

Pick one of the secrets and either

• create a new character who carries this secret with them. How does it make him or her behave? What lengths will he or she go to in order to keep that secret close?
• give one of these secrets to an existing character and decide whether your character will keep his or her secret or "send it out into the world", that is, tell someone about it. That someone could be a stranger, or it could be someone close to them who might change their feelings toward the character based on this secret's contents.
• write about a character who would only share their secrets in the manner of Post Secret. Anonymously.

See where this takes you.

Which Characters Walk Around in Your Head?

Sometimes, a character from a story stays with us. He or she is that memorable.The fiery Rhoda in Ellen Gilchrist's stories. Tyler from Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Any character from Joseph Heller's Catch-22. We each have a few characters that walk around with us long after the story closes.

But what of that? What makes a character textured, unique, whole? Is it his/her sense of humor? Intelligence? The way he/she relates to the situations or other characters encountered in the story's telling? His/her involvement or detachment from the story's momentum? All of these?

In class, we'll talk about getting to know your character, through exploring various character traits. But there's more to it, so let's get at something even deeper. There's who a character *is*, and then there's something else, the something that gives your story momentum.

When it comes to creating memorable characters, ask yourself:

• What does my character want, more than anything else?
• What is my character's secret, the thing he/she carries around balled up in darkness?
• What is his/her largest contradiction? What two contradictory ideas does your character hold that give him/her the largest difficulty?
• Where has your character failed him/herself along the way and what is he/she doing about it?

When you know the answers to these questions, you possess some powerful rocket fuel. Start the engine.

Thoughts on "Writer's Block"

Many writers say they don't 'believe' in "writer's block." Their reasons differ, but most note that the term "writer's block" is one other writers use instead of actually stating that they are self-editing for content or the conscious effort to produce for a specific audience is limiting their subject, theme, or choices (in general). Most of us may describe a period of lacking creativity or engagement as "writer's block" and others may consider it a major set-back within a project - a disasterous ruin to a 'good idea' - and, for most of us, every day life just simply distracts us.

For the purpose of conquering the issue known as "writer's block," many writers have established routines like making themselves write every day, or turn to books like What if? or any of the many writer's 'idea' books out there for prompts. How do you conquer "writer's block"?

Links Added to the Blog Roll

Some links have been added to our blog roll ------->

BLOG ONLY EXERCISE: Wants

From The 3 A.M. Epiphany by Brian Kitely

Write a story in which two characters both want the same thing, and if one gets what she wants, the other can't have what he wants. Limit the story to 500 words.

Great literature is often built on such conundrums. We watch the great tragedies of Shakespeare or the Greeks unfold amd come to this sort of point where resolution is impossible -- Hamlet can't obey his father's ghost and his mother's wishes at the same time.

Life does not always set up situations which we can control; it often gives us choices of lesser evils, or even two equally bad evils. You can put contemporary characters in this sort of bind with smaller stakes that are no less wrenching. The best stories have the simplest problems at their heart.

IN CLASS EXERCISE: The Hospital Room

Here's the exercise we completed in class on 2/14/06:

From Richard Bausch in What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers

Describe the look and feel of the specific objects within their dramatic context.
The room has a large window. It is 7:30 in the evening, July 3rd, a cool, breezy day, with the vivid colors of clear summer everywhere outside--trees and grass with the late sun on them, blue mountains in the distance.

Inside the room are these objects:

• a metal-framed hospital bed
• a night stand with water glass and plastic pitcher, a bowl of fruit, and small clock radio
• a tv on an apparatus, supported in the air over the bed
• a small trash can with a plastic bag in it
• a hardback chair
• a box of tissues
• a pastel of cows standing in a grassy field, with sun and mountain beyond

Describe this room from the point of view of a young man who has come to visit his wife, with whom he is very much in love, after the successful and "easy" delivery of a new baby they both have wanted. She is in the bed, with the baby, and everything is happy, if slightly scary, since they are young and this is a new experiences altogether. Deliver what he feels through what you say about how he sees the room.

--or--

Describe this room from the point of view of the adult child of an elderly parent who is in the hospital dying from natural causes. The parent is quite elderly but loved. Deliver what the offspring feels through what you say about how he or she sees the room.

Objective
To learn to describe physical props in a story so that they reflect the particular sensibility of a character moving among them.

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