Attendance and Journal
Questions for Stephen Project Work Time: Revising, Rewriting, Building Better Stories BIG, REALLY IMPORTANT QUESTION: WHAT IS THE DESIRE OF YOUR PROTAGONIST (YOU)?? 1. Food for Thought! Read the excerpt below from "On Desire" from a Colorado State University Creative Writing Professor. If you want challenge, click on the link and read the original blog post. How can you apply this piece about fiction writing to your own story? Excerpts from "On Desire" Characters must want something in order to be interesting. And the stronger the character’s desire becomes, the more intriguing the character often becomes. When creating characters, start with desire. List what they want (their conscious desires, which might change over the course of the story). Then try to figure out what lies beneath these conscious desires. What’s their deeper, driving unconscious desire that they’re not aware of? The stronger a character’s desire (or obsession), the more they’ll drive the action of the story (and often the more interesting they’ll be). Once you know your character’s conscious and unconscious desires, think about how these desires might conflict. Try to plot your story in response to your character’s desires. So ask yourself, how might the character make things worse for his/her self by pursuing the wrong desire? What events might put pressure on your character and force his/her deeper, unconscious desire to the surface? Basically, complex characters need to have different levels of desires, and those desires not only drive them, they drive the actions of the story because the best plots are often external manifestations of a character’s internal conflicts. Don’t believe me? Go over your mental list of great characters. For each one, I bet you can think of a clear surface desire, and a deeper unconscious desire (and often these two things will conflict in some way). For instance, Scout: she wants to be seen as a grownup. But really, she wants to have her mom back, and be protected as a child. It’s this push and pull between two extremes that makes her so fascinating, and so representative of childhood. Or Holden: He doesn’t want to be part of the phony adult world he sees all around him. But unconsciously, he realizes he is part of it, and so his true, unconscious desire is to be an adult, and protect other kids from falling off the cliff. His deeper desire is so important to his character and to the story that it’s the title of the book, although we don’t realize this until nearly the end of the book. Or Citizen Kane. He thinks he wants wealth, power, and fame, but none of these things satisfy him. In fact, they only serve to isolate him and take him further from his unconscious desire (thus, the story is a tragedy). In the end, we learn that Kane’s deep, unrequited, unconscious desire was to regain the sort of simple freedom and sense of play and familial connection that he had as a child (as represented by his sled, “Rosebud”). Or Gatsby, who initially thinks he wants to win back Daisy, but when he does, he isn’t satisfied, and instead his conscious desire switches to wanting to erase and recreate the past (to get Daisy to admit that she never loved Tom). Yet as Gatsby’s conscious desires are stripped away, we see that Gatsby’s driving unconscious desire all along was to reinvent himself, and become someone else. It’s an emblematic American desire, but it’s also a self-destructive desire, and so Gatsby must die to achieve it. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s some other secret heart to character that helps us relate to these made-up strangers so different from ourselves. But for me, for now, it’s desire. Revising Checklists Galore IRON OUT THE BIG ISSUES FIRST! What's the point in spending hours refining things at the sentence level if you still have some major story level (plot, character) issues! You'll end up deleting things that you've spent a lot of time on, and while that's not inherently bad, it does get a little frustrating... "Need to know how well your writing, editing and revisions are going? Here’s a variety of checklists to help you evaluate where you are in the writing process." I've selected a couple of the ones below that I think are most helpful for our purposes. But, if you'd like to look around yourself, I highly encourage you to do that by clicking the link above. Mild: Revision Checklist for Novelist - Wow. This is a great checklist. Even though it's geared towards a novel, it still hits a lot of the major elements that we've been talking about the last 2 weeks. Medium: 10 Checkpoints for a Scene - The scene is the basic unit in writing. Your stories are most likely built around a few key scenes. Use this checklist and its big, open-ended questions to think about how well you are constructing your scene(s). Spicy: Style: Checklist for Fiction Writers - Crawford Killian is a Canadian novelist and professor. Use this checklist for improving your writing style once you've already hammered out the basics of your story (basics = character's desire, results, responses; specific details used consistently throughout the story)
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