Everything comes together in the Capstone. You will draft a complete story, narrative essay, or memoir of 8–15 pages. With the advice of your peer readers, you will revise, rewrite, and complete it. The skills you’ve learned of plotting, setting, physical description, characterization, and stylistic clarity and innovation will culminate in an original work of art all your own. We’ll discuss the steps that professional writers take to bring their work into the public world. Along the way you’ll learn the patient habits of revision that make up the writer’s life.
Revise, Revise, Revise
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來自 Wesleyan University 的課程
Capstone: Your Story
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從本節課中
Rewriting and Publication
If the theme of Week Three was Compose, compose, compose, this week’s theme is Revise, rewrite; revise, rewrite. We’ll discuss different ways of reading and approaching your draft to catch the action and the language and the characterization from different angles. Through a conversation with Brando Skyhorse, we’ll also take a moment to discuss what to do after the class if you hope some day soon to publish your work.
與講師見面
Salvatore ScibonaFrank B. Weeks Visiting Professor of English
[MUSIC]
Welcome to week six, the end is in sight.
Our focus this week is on rewriting and publication.
This segment, we're going to talk about revision, revision, revision.
You've gotten some more language-specific advice from your readers,
it should help give you an idea of the special quirks of your own style, and
where it might improve.
I hope you will still bear in mind that list from Sofia McManus are those chatting
or thinking words that get on the page very quickly and
can come out without any expense to the story as a whole.
You've given critiques and learned how to look for
language level issues that can really break open a piece and make it flourish.
Think of what you saw in your fellow fellow's work and be frank with yourself
about maybe whether you're falling prey to some of the same mistakes.
Are you using a lot of the passive voice?
Are you relying on being verbs, for example.
One thing that I think it's important to look at as you're
looking at the language specifically is to try and
locate the action in the world rather than in the mind.
Here's what I mean by that.
Consider the difference between he thought about the cat falling out of the tree and
the cat fell out of the tree.
The key difference there is in the verb.
The verb in the first sentence is thought, the verb in the second sentence is fell.
When you give the sentence in the second version you are making part of
a dramatization.
You're making part of a scene.
When you give it in the first version you're locating the action in the mind
where nothing really happens.
You just find a person thinking about it.
Likewise, locate the action in
the world rather than in the faculties of perception.
So for example, if you are writing very consistently one character's point of
view, it's superfluous to say he saw the cat fall out of the tree.
When you can just say the cat fell out of the tree.
That's an actual vivid action scene.
The more you can comb those verbs of perception ad thought,
those places where you say the character remembered or
wondered and just go directly to the thing that happened.
Later in this sentence you're going to be more and more and
more in applied action based story.
You've got two more weeks to put your story into its final shape.
After that you'll get one more round of critics, an evaluation,
from three of your peers about the final product and what it's all meant to them.
Let's talk for a minute about a couple of strategies you might consider for
revision.
After a while of reading and
re-reading the same story it can start to seem pretty flat and you might not
be able to make a strong connection with the work that you're doing.
So I think it can be really helpful at that moment when you get stuck to look at,
to look at your story in a format that you haven't used before.
For example, if you've been working on a computer screen, print it out and you'd be
amazed at the difference it makes when you actually see the thing on paper or if for
example you've been only doing it on paper you might consider reading it
on the screen.
Another strategy, you could retype it.
This might seem really laborious, but I think it can be
often the step that makes the story really come together in your mind.
In other words, print the story out, put it next to you, and
retype it, the whole thing into a new fresh document.
I often think of this as sort of piano practice,
you start to put the thing together right from the beginning, and you'll see that.
Forever once in a while your mind will wander away while the fingers
keep on typing and things come to you in this way, in this sort of stupid way or
you're doing this really sort of dumb work.
I'm just typing the letters back in.
Changes will come to you in that way that you've never considered before.
A third option very important, read it out loud.
If you haven't been reading it out loud you've been really missing out.
There are things that come to you through your ear that wouldn't
necessarily come to you through your eyes or
if you're re-typing through your experience of your fingers.
And then read it aloud again.
You might open a voice memo on your phone or a tape recorder and
tape yourself reading the story out loud.
Then put in your ear buds and go for a walk and listen to yourself reading it.
Again, it will sound different than you think it did.
Next, after you've spent a lot of time revising the story you're probably
thinking about it very slowly indeed.
Well something you might do to correct that is to read the story with a pencil in
your hand, and try to do it almost at the speed that a reader would read the story.
If it's a 10 or 15 page story maybe that only takes half an hour or 35 minutes.
And you'd be amazed that the connections that you make in your brain
as you're reading it, that more normal pace.
Somehow open up parts of the story that you wouldn't have thought of before.
I often like to do that with a pencil in my hand.
And only very quickly making little marks in the margin too.
Remind myself that I had a thought at that particular moment.
But that's stopping and not bearing down at that particular moment in the story.
Yet another strategy.
Print it and read it in a place or
at a time of day that you've never used before for your work.
If you are normally a morning writer and
you only work on your story before you go to work, say.
Well try printing it out in the morning, and
then read it right before you go to bed.
In other words, the light will change in your mind.
All of your habits have changed, and
you'll be able to see that story again from another point of view.
As you do all of these revisions,
pay attention to the places where you find yourself wanting to skim.
Those are places where you haven't til now acknowledged that
maybe the story's gotten a little boring.
Now is the time for pushing on meaning, sense, and clarity.
Places where you felt a wobble that you haven't wanted to acknowledge.
Push on the language to make it clear.
[MUSIC]
