Mini Summer Flashback
I spent the weekend meeting up with friends from CW06.
Friday night we had dinner at Guy's house with Gord and his girlfriend. Gord gave me an English translation of two stories by Kim Young-ha. He thought I'd especially like the second story, "Whatever Happened to the Guy Stuck in the Elevator?", without even remembering my brief incident being stuck in an elevator the other week. I finished reading the story last night and I did enjoy it tremendously. Darkly funny with lots of energy. Plus, it's different enough from my usual fare that I'll be churning over in my head how he made the story work. Anyway, dinner was mellow and relaxing. I'm glad I finally got to meet Gord's girlfriend, plus Guy's wife Gayle is lovely, and it was good to have an evening out with Brad where he could finally meet some of my friends.
On Saturday I drove down to Seattle with Guy and Gayle. We met up with Caroline, Mark and his wife, Paul Park, and Leslie at Tula's jazz club for dinner. I didn't get to talk to anyone much there--loud jazz music makes that a little hard--but it was good to see everyone.
Sunday was Paul's workshop on writing settings. Mostly he talked about the same things he talked about during class at Clarion West, but that seems like it was so long ago that a refresher was good. Things about playing with the reader's expectations, having different layers of your story working against each other, how emotional effects are often the result of the visualization you do when writing while intellectual effects are the result of the architecture of the story, the skeleton you outline and plan. How story can generate itself out of a clear visualization, and how when plots go off track, it's often because your visualization has become vague.
He did some in-class writing exercises which were new to me. The first two were focused on describing a setting while keeping in mind a scenario picked from a list he provided. The options all incorporated some sort of contradiction or conflict between what was expected and what was actually happening with the character, like writing about a beautiful setting from the view of a depressed person or decribing an occasion where there's an emotional subtext different from what we'd expect, e.g. fury at the wedding or joy at the funeral. For the third exercise we wrote about a person from a photograph we'd chosen, gradually expanding our paragraph from a straight physical description to include the moment surrounding it and then the person's emotional context, his/her history and motivations. The last exercise had us watch a section of a film showing a very detailed and rich setting into which we were to put some characters and write a scenario that included as much of the setting as we could. The last exercise was the hardest for me, I think because there was so much about the setting that I didn't know. The scene we watched was from the film Barraka, showing the steps by the Ganges in Varanasi with pilgrims bathing and praying in the river and families burning their dead on pyres, and there were just so many things that I would have wanted to know the words for and the proper ritual for before I wrote anything set there that just trying to come up with a scenario based on the visuals I saw was tough.
It felt weird sitting at a table with Mark and Guy and hearing Paul say, "What worked for you in this? Think about the effect of [insert interesting way of changing the story]..." and yet not having the rest of my class around the table. It was like one of those dreams where half of what you expect is there but the rest is all mishmashed with strange objects and people. Like a Paul Park story.
Overall a good weekend. Good especially to see some friends and get my brain thinking about writing, apart from the usual "Dear God, I need to finish a story!" I'm surprised by how many CW friends I've managed to see post-Clarion, and I hope I get to catch up with some more of them soon.
[Note to CW06ers: Paul mentioned that, sadly, the lion no longer speaks.]
Friday night we had dinner at Guy's house with Gord and his girlfriend. Gord gave me an English translation of two stories by Kim Young-ha. He thought I'd especially like the second story, "Whatever Happened to the Guy Stuck in the Elevator?", without even remembering my brief incident being stuck in an elevator the other week. I finished reading the story last night and I did enjoy it tremendously. Darkly funny with lots of energy. Plus, it's different enough from my usual fare that I'll be churning over in my head how he made the story work. Anyway, dinner was mellow and relaxing. I'm glad I finally got to meet Gord's girlfriend, plus Guy's wife Gayle is lovely, and it was good to have an evening out with Brad where he could finally meet some of my friends.
On Saturday I drove down to Seattle with Guy and Gayle. We met up with Caroline, Mark and his wife, Paul Park, and Leslie at Tula's jazz club for dinner. I didn't get to talk to anyone much there--loud jazz music makes that a little hard--but it was good to see everyone.
Sunday was Paul's workshop on writing settings. Mostly he talked about the same things he talked about during class at Clarion West, but that seems like it was so long ago that a refresher was good. Things about playing with the reader's expectations, having different layers of your story working against each other, how emotional effects are often the result of the visualization you do when writing while intellectual effects are the result of the architecture of the story, the skeleton you outline and plan. How story can generate itself out of a clear visualization, and how when plots go off track, it's often because your visualization has become vague.
He did some in-class writing exercises which were new to me. The first two were focused on describing a setting while keeping in mind a scenario picked from a list he provided. The options all incorporated some sort of contradiction or conflict between what was expected and what was actually happening with the character, like writing about a beautiful setting from the view of a depressed person or decribing an occasion where there's an emotional subtext different from what we'd expect, e.g. fury at the wedding or joy at the funeral. For the third exercise we wrote about a person from a photograph we'd chosen, gradually expanding our paragraph from a straight physical description to include the moment surrounding it and then the person's emotional context, his/her history and motivations. The last exercise had us watch a section of a film showing a very detailed and rich setting into which we were to put some characters and write a scenario that included as much of the setting as we could. The last exercise was the hardest for me, I think because there was so much about the setting that I didn't know. The scene we watched was from the film Barraka, showing the steps by the Ganges in Varanasi with pilgrims bathing and praying in the river and families burning their dead on pyres, and there were just so many things that I would have wanted to know the words for and the proper ritual for before I wrote anything set there that just trying to come up with a scenario based on the visuals I saw was tough.
It felt weird sitting at a table with Mark and Guy and hearing Paul say, "What worked for you in this? Think about the effect of [insert interesting way of changing the story]..." and yet not having the rest of my class around the table. It was like one of those dreams where half of what you expect is there but the rest is all mishmashed with strange objects and people. Like a Paul Park story.
Overall a good weekend. Good especially to see some friends and get my brain thinking about writing, apart from the usual "Dear God, I need to finish a story!" I'm surprised by how many CW friends I've managed to see post-Clarion, and I hope I get to catch up with some more of them soon.
[Note to CW06ers: Paul mentioned that, sadly, the lion no longer speaks.]
posted by tinatsu at 10:28 PM
7 Comments:
The refresher paul park would be particularly good, since we had him week 1 - and that seems like forever ago.
sad news about the lion. :(
Week 1 seemed like forever ago by week 4. And the whole thing seems like it took place in another life by now.
Glad you liked the story. :)
I don't know, I kind of like that the lion has taken up his silence!
As for me, week 1 seems not so very long ago at all.
By the way, thanks for Sandman. I read some on the way home, and am enjoying it now, too.
If lions could speak...
They'd only talk until their batteries ran out.
(BTW, Gord, I read the other story in the Kim Young-ha book, "Photo Shop Murder," and I wasn't as fond of that one as I was of the elevator story. I grabbed some of the other tranlsations you brought, though; we'll see how those go.)
Ditto tinas, anti-ditto Gord, CW06 Week 1 seems like not just an eternity ago, but several eternities.
Thanks for this entry Tinatsu. Paul is a wonderful teacher. Just reading about this reminds me of that first week at CW. It sounds like it was a wonderful weekend. Yes, you're lucky to have met so many of the class so often. :)
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