Blog Response 10/30/13
Brandon Lazovic
To begin with, we
were given three packets to introduce us to fiction. The first packet that I
read was Writing Fiction by Burroway.
Fiction is all about show vs. tell, and we are to tell through our own personal
experiences and make the reader feel. The purpose of fiction is to allow the
reader to feel things in which there is no negative price to pay for feeling
them, such as love, condemn, condone, hope, dread, hate, without risk. We are
to rely on the five senses to convey these emotions to the reader, as well as
provide definite and concrete details to add to the validity of the story being
told. Those details, however, must be relevant and significant. If we were to
write about every single detail throughout the day it wouldn’t relay to the
reader at all. In the end, emotion is the physical reaction of the body to
react to information. In the packet it’s also touched upon that verbs can add
to writing, but can also detract from the energy in using them with what is
known as the pathetic fallacy (attributing emotions to man-made objects) if used
too often. Adverbs can also express emphasis or suddenness, but slow the
sentence down so it dilutes the force of the meaning in the sentence. Rhythm,
prose, and punctuation are used to great effect as well when writing as it helps
take the reader beyond just the words on the page. In the packet the story Everything that Rises must Converge by
Flannery O’Connor demonstrates everything that the packet stated, tying it all
together.
The next packet,
Polaroid, discusses characters and plot. It states that no one really knows how
a draft will go, or what twists and turns it will take, but eventually a story
will come out of it. The author discusses a special Olympics meet that they went
to and eventually got an idea for their story. Again, emotional output is
important to flesh out a character. Each person gets their own acre of land in
an emotional sense, and we use that to make them come alive as we write about
them. No person is exactly the same. It also says in the fiction packet that a
likeable narrator is key in a story, and to this effect I’d have to agree. They
use the analogy of, ‘if you enjoy someone’s company, even if they ask you to a
garbage dump you couldn’t think of anywhere else you’d want to be, as opposed
to having a boring or annoying person ask you on an expensive dinner date that
they would pay for and you would rather stay at home.” Narrator’s also must be
reliable and trustworthy. We have an obligation to telling the truth even
though we are making up characters. We have to listen to our characters and
give them justice on the page.
The packet then
moves on to plot and the main rule that I got out of it was write about the
characters first, and the plot will soon follow. Don’t work so specifically on
the plot scheme because in the end it just won’t work. Keep it vivid and
continuous and have people read it to work out the kinks from a neutral
standpoint. Dialogue becomes a topic and for me I consider dialogue to be
extremely important. In a sense, having bad dialogue in an otherwise good story
is like watching a B-list movie with horrible writing and acting, but the
exposition is good. It just takes the reader out of the story and dissolves a
character. Again, time will help flesh out the character. Dialogue requires a
little finesse, only because you can’t jam words into the characters mouth. It
has to come naturally, which will happen once your familiarity with the
character becomes realized. The final packet, syntax by Goldberg, I feel ties
in a lot with the previous two packets and reiterates the same things to
varying degrees, so I’m not going to go in depth about that packet. But in all
these three packets are a lot to take in, but really give good advice to
aspiring writers that I’ve never thought about before when I’ve wrote stories,
and I’ll come away from this with a good amount of writing tools to help expand
my stories.
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