10.3.13

If you'd like to rewatch: HERE 'TIS.

For TUESDAY 10.8.13

Read (if you never have, or even if you want a refresher, plus we're nearing Halloween)--The Tell-Tale Heart... by Edgar Allen Poe

Also read: The Twirler by Jane Martin.

Also: The Semplica-Girl Diaries by George Saunders (who said: ending is stopping that doesn't suck)

ALL ARE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUES OF A SORT--AND CREEPY AND WEIRD--YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE CREEPY OR WEIRD WHEN YOU WRITE YOURS

Write: A short story (in dramatic monologue form) 700+ words whose title is a single word that you looked up in the Oxford English Dictionary-- (the point is to use the multiple definitions as fuel for the monologue... how that works is up to you)...  I think the OED link will only work from SLU affiliated computers.  There's a hardcopy in the library too (and another at my house if you want to drop by for tea) and that's more fun (the actual volumes I mean--not the tea, and yes, the plural is correct.)

Here's today's handout for Andrew, Kalin, and Sarah (who are now a new peer trio):

TONE (thanks to Brooks Haxton)

Tone is attitude in language: sympathetic, haughty, confused, friendly, insulted, calculating, indifferent, amazed, horrified, etc. If point of view is a person’s location, the person’s attitude (physical bearing) is the body language of the person as she stands in that location. Since the body of fiction IS language, tone is the posture of language, in word choice, sentence structure, logical development, emotional range and emphasis, soundplay, etc. Tone involves feeling, but it comes also of the THINKING that follows upon feeling (as if they were possible to separate), thinking even as it supercedes feeling (think self-deception here). Tone indicates a relationship between two people, one reading the tone of the other. Tone is a (more-or-less) deliberate act of communication. A hurt tone of voice arises from feeling hurt; the feeling may be the prime fact of the situation for the speaker, but TONE registers not just the feeling, but what the speaker chooses to make of that feeling. Tone indicates how the speaker has chosen to come across to others/an audience. Because tone involves not merely feeling, but thought and choice, we may not like the tone someone takes with us, although we sympathize with her feelings.

DICTION

Diction is word choice: vocabulary working with the distinct logic and flavor given it by particulars of phrasing and syntax. We say that there are levels of diction—from low to high: street, slang, colloquial, vernacular, plain-style, literate, eloquent, lofty. Terms toward either extreme may be negative, depending partly on the social situation of the person using them.  Our diction reflects a stratified society, but it also reflects specialization. Every profession has its own vocabulary: think computer programmer, personal trainer, lit critic, ballet dancer, molecular geneticist. Diction is an identifying characteristic, but not simply of class. To many writers, the boundaries between levels and types of diction are laws made to be broken—not disregarded, but intelligently transcended.  Much of the energy in modern writing comes from combining language from different sources, especially in English where Latinate and Germanic words smack of such divergent culture.

VOICE

Maybe the easiest way to think of the distinction between voice and tone/voice and POV is to think of the way you recognize a person speaking over the phone. To recognize the voice is to recognize the whole person; to recognize any or some of the other elements is partial recognition. Voice is the character revealed by the use of language. The narrator uses voice to create a fiction, whether that fiction is one character among a story of many, or the poet speaking directly to the reader. Writers like Salinger can make an elaborate stage business of presenting the narrator-as-character.  Some, ex. Toni Morrison in Beloved, seem equally insistent on having the narrator’s character be that of an Everyperson(s) witnessing the circumstances at hand. However controlled or free a writer is with voice, the paradox remains: voice is the most intimate revelation of a character or narrator, the most unlikely contraption for lies about who s/he wishes, fears or believes her/himself to be.  Utterance, even of someone else’s words, is changed utterly by the voice of the utterer.  (Now say that five times fast.)

NEW GROUPS (same schedule as below--you just may be in a different group now so adjust your calendars accordingly):

C (wkshopping Tuesday): Chris, Pete, Raisul, Megan, Sarah

A (wkshopping Thursday): Kim P, Kim H, Jacqui, Caitlin, Andrew

B (wkshopping Tuesday the 15th) Amanda, John, Alana, Rhonny, Kalin