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Teaching writing 2009 Video, 700k
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| Rating | |
| Title | Teaching writing, Iowa City Public Library, November 9, 2009 |
| Creator |
Dong, Qizhang, 1967- Abdel-Latif, Yasser White, Kathy, 1966- Rachedi, Mabrouck Santaella Kruk, Fedosy, 1970- |
| Creator - Nationality |
Hongkonger Egyptian New Zealander French Venezuelan |
| Contributor | Merrill, Christopher |
| Date Original | 2009-11-09 |
| Description | Dung Kai Cheung titled his talk "Towards Writing as a Folk Art" and tries to redefine the strata where different types of writers sit, from the established masters seen traditionally at the "top" to the learners and readers seen traditionally at the "bottom." Yasser Abdel-Latif's talk, titled "You Cannot Teach Writing--But You Can Provoke Talent" and discusses the evolution of the creative writing workshop he established in a Cairo bookstore in 2006. Kathy White's talk, titled "Cane Toads and Underpants: A Pocket Guide to Writing for Boys" gives a brief overview of the do's and don'ts of writing for a young male readership, bringing to her work the perspective of a children's librarian. Mabrouck Rachedi's talk, titled "Workshops as Weapons of Mass Transmission" bringing to the discussion his experiences teaching writing to younger age groups in a workshop setting, often in locations others fear. Fedosy Santaella's talk, "The Complex Simplicity of Teaching Fiction Writing" discusses how to get the most out of teaching writing by focusing on structures and stories. |
| Venue |
Iowa City Public Library |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | 1 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 11, 2009: Dung Kai Cheung (Hong Kong), Yasser Abdel-Latif (Egypt), Kathy White (New Zealand), Mabrouck Rachedi (France) and Fedosy Santaella (Venezuela) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Dung Kai Cheung TOWARDS WRITING AS A FOLK ART Teaching writing. These two words sound extremely simple, even a little boring. We all take it for granted that we know what they mean, at least separately. But when put together, and considered seriously, they sound, somehow, like a paradox. The paradox is that, for many, writing is something that cannot and need not be taught. It comes from talent, and either you have it or you don’t. You are born with it. Nobody can give it to you or take it from you. It is a gift. In the end, writing becomes the privilege of the few chosen ones. For the rest of us, writing remains forever a failed or unattainable aspiration. But thanks to a recent trend in the pedagogic enterprise, something called “teaching writing” has been created, into which all those who are not destined to be the greatest writers are thrown to teach and be taught. It is like some sort of a second- or third-class cabin to heaven. At least you can get on and end up somewhere in the right neighborhood. As a writer and a teacher of writing, I don’t think so. Writing, as any other art form, is often envisioned in the form of a hierarchy. At the top are the few gods, mythical and canonical figures, who represent the highest talents and achievements a culture can beget. In the middle are a larger number of writers or literary practitioners who may be interesting in various ways but are certainly playing the supporting roles in the great drama of literary history. At the bottom is the anonymous majority formed by the readers of literature. I am not sure where the critics stand. To be sure, the appreciation and cultivation of “greatness” is indisputable. But writing is not just for greatness. I would like to suggest another model of envisioning the practice of writing, in which neither the renowned nor the obscure are precluded. Rather than a hierarchy running from top to bottom in terms of literary talent, like the seven-storey mountain of purgatory, I suggest that we view the activity of writing as a wide spectrum. That is, we move from a vertical model to a horizontal one. At the one end where writing is most intense, concentrated, prolific and artistically mastered are the most recognized writers of an age. At the other end, the difference is not in talent or greatness or achievement, but in the meaning of writing to the practitioner. For those who do not become great writers, writing still means something, often a lot. And for those who only read, some experience in writing will certainly enrich their appreciation of what they read. What I am proposing is no less than an idea of writing as a folk art, or writing as a personal and communal practice. In what we call folk art, the existence of expertise and amateurish practices are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they reinforce one another. There are always those who take the lead or mark the heights, but everybody is more or less participating, and benefiting from it. Aided by technology, the age has come when writing and the dissemination of writing have become more independent of traditional forms of publishing. Some celebrate and 2 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 11, 2009: Dung Kai Cheung (Hong Kong), Yasser Abdel-Latif (Egypt), Kathy White (New Zealand), Mabrouck Rachedi (France) and Fedosy Santaella (Venezuela) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu some resent the saying that nowadays, everybody can be a writer. But I see in it the possibility of a more “democratic” view of writing. That’s where, finally, teaching comes in. When writing is taught with a whole spectrum in mind, students are encouraged to find in writing a meaning for themselves and for others, with all meanings equally valid. Some may aspire to higher standards, greater commitments and wider cultural significance, while others can rest assured that writing as a habit also does them immense good. In whatever part of the spectrum, writing helps one to cultivate creativity, sensitivity, vision and responsibility. By the last I mean the capability and readiness to respond to the calls and challenges of the world. These qualities are certainly not taught directly, but they can only be conveyed or inspired through an intended act of teaching, with a spectrum of learners as wide as can be imagined. One example is the change in point of view, and the coexistence of multiple points of view in narrative. This is more than a literary technique. It requires one to step out of habitual, and sometimes prejudiced, ways of seeing and empathize with the thoughts and feelings of others. That’s what literary imagination is all about. And the comparison and contention between perspectives can lead to critical thinking. In my experience, students can learn to write across gender, generation and class differences. For example, there are community writing projects in which young students visit elderly residents of old districts, writing their stories to rebuild a sense of local history and communal life, and working against the devastation caused by the ruthless logic of urban development. We will continue to need great writers, but writing as a personal and communal practice is no less meaningful to the self and to the whole. Writing does not always need to be taught, but teaching, if undertaken with the correct perspective, will certainly bring out the most meaningful in writing to anyone searching for it. Yasser Abdel-Latif YOU CANNOT TEACH WRITING – BUT YOU CAN PROVOKE TALENT Teaching creative writing is not something that is very widespread in Egypt or the Arab world. In fact, such programs do not even exist in universities there. In Egyptian universities, writers aren’t hired to teach because universities are inflexible in their assumption of what constitutes appropriate academic study. They teach the history of literature, but they don’t teach the act or process of creative writing. Regarding this fact, we have to ask ourselves: can literature be taught? In 2006, a very elegant bookshop called Kotobkhan opened in my neighborhood. It was the first of its kind in this bourgeois area, where members of the Egyptian upper-middleclass are literate, but not very accustomed to literary culture. The owner, who is the wife of one of my friends, invited me to the opening, and during the party we began to discuss ways to stimulate cultural events in her new shop. I suggested the organization of a creative writing workshop. 3 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 11, 2009: Dung Kai Cheung (Hong Kong), Yasser Abdel-Latif (Egypt), Kathy White (New Zealand), Mabrouck Rachedi (France) and Fedosy Santaella (Venezuela) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu This suggestion, to form a workshop, emerged from an old desire of mine. I wanted to treat writing in a different way, in an interactive frame with others, especially after the emigration of most of the literary friends with whom I started my writing career. I was missing this interactive forum for ideas and experiences and wanted to form a new community of writers. The idea behind the first workshop was to address the issue of how to take personal narratives, such as diaries, memoirs and blogs and transmute these personal experiences into creative writing. So we publicized the workshop on the internet and asked potential participants to present some samples of their previous writing, so that we could select writers with the degree of talent required to work on the project. We chose eleven participants from dozens of applicants. And then, work began on a weekly basis. Each session in the bookshop lasted for two hours. I had thought that participants would be drawn from the residents of the neighborhood, but what amazed me was that the participants were coming from different places in the city. One of them even came from a northern city seventy miles from Cairo. Their ages ranged from twenty-five to forty and they came from a wide variety backgrounds and professions. I started by suggesting that they write a page or two on a particular theme, and the next week, we discussed what they had written. From the paragraphs they wrote, we collectively chose the strongest parts and removed what we considered weak or superficial, but we kept the nucleus of the piece, the part that had the most potential to be extended. We continued this way, with the writers periodically taking on a new theme, and engaging in the same process of editing the weak portions and keeping the core of the narrative. Not all of the writers continued until the end of the season—at the end, eight of the original eleven remained. And after nine months, we had an anthology of short stories that was published by the same bookshop as the fruit of its first writing workshop. The second workshop was offered under the title “Your First Novel.” We chose participants using the same method, except that they also had to present a one- to two-page proposal for a novel that they wanted to focus on during the workshop. Again, we had dozens of applicants, and we chose twelve. On the same weekly basis, we discussed the strong and weak aspects of the manuscripts. As the challenge of novels was stronger than that posed by short stories, five writers continued to the end of the workshop, which lasted six months. By that point we had five new novels, and five new novelists. The style and content of the five novels are very different, from a romantic comedy to one in the labyrinthine style of Borges. We are currently in the process of editing the novels for publication. Now, three years since the first workshop began in Cairo, four other writing workshops are held: two in the capital, one in Alexandria, and another in Mansoura, which is northeast of Cairo. All of them are held in bookshops or cafés, which are a new space in the Egyptian cultural scene. 4 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 11, 2009: Dung Kai Cheung (Hong Kong), Yasser Abdel-Latif (Egypt), Kathy White (New Zealand), Mabrouck Rachedi (France) and Fedosy Santaella (Venezuela) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu For decades, the literary field in Egypt lay virgin in its test of amateur writers. And now, the scene is changing into one of more industrialization and commercialization. The publishing industry is becoming stronger, and literary prizes are becoming more numerous. And this has increased the need for learning writing. This grows parallel with the spread of writing workshops in Egypt. But still, the question remains: can we, as writers, teach writing? Or can we only provoke talented amateurs to produce work that is genuine? Kathy White CANE TOADS AND UNDERPANTS: A POCKET GUIDE TO WRITING FOR BOYS I’m a children’s librarian who writes for kids. Stereotypes might tell you that this means I write about bums, underpants, schools of wizardry, rainbow fairies, intestinal worms, dinosaurs, young spies or squashed cane toads. Not yet. My income would probably double if I did. If I wrote about vampires and put a red and black cover on it, my income would skyrocket, no doubt. I teach short, practical writing courses – the equivalent of the Dummies’ Guide to Elvis and Kite Surf in a Weekend. But today I’ve squeezed it even further into a Dingbat’s Pocket Guide to Writing a Boys’ Bestseller, because boy readers are harsh critics, and if you write something they love, you’ll become a literary hero. 1. Write about an orphaned boy (Harry Potter or Alex Rider), or at least a kid with pathetic or disturbed parents as in Roald Dahl’s Matilda. Boys generally only read about boys, but there is a bit of violence in Matilda. Remember when Miss Trunchbull does the hammer-throw, wildly swinging a girl by her plaits, around and around above her head. That compensates sufficiently for Matilda being a girl. The main character should have a sad background story, and plenty of room for good or bad growth. Then give this little schmuck something to do and some skills to do it, but just a few. He has to struggle with a capital S. Don’t make things easy for him or your readers will start yawning and crawl back to their Xbox. 2. Add some buddies, and at least one enemy. Give them distinctive personalities, and different names. Names matter in kids’ books. Don’t call your characters Jed, Joe and Jill. Vary the consonants and number of syllables, or your readers will get confused. Why do you think J.K. Rowling was inspired by Ron Weasley, who is dim but funny, Harry Potter, the imperfect but brave hero and Hermione Granger, the brainbox? Together they are a force to be reckoned with. As for the enemies, be unkind. Give them harsh-sounding names that blend consonants or that means something particularly nasty in another language (Miss Trunchbull, Severus Snape and Voldemort). Parents are okay as small-bit characters in your story but keep them out of the spotlight. Penguin, the publisher of the Puffin imprint told me this when I was writing for the Kiwi Bites series. 5 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 11, 2009: Dung Kai Cheung (Hong Kong), Yasser Abdel-Latif (Egypt), Kathy White (New Zealand), Mabrouck Rachedi (France) and Fedosy Santaella (Venezuela) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu 3. Knowing what type of story it is helps you to figure out the sort of things that need to happen in the plot, and how it needs to end. If your character is looking for something, he needs to find it … eventually … even if it takes 14 books to do so (Deltora Quest, Inheritance Trilogy, Warriors). Give him GADGETS to help him achieve his goal (Zac Power, Alpha Force, Maximum Ride, Cherub, Artemis Fowl) and creatures to thwart him (Percy Jackson and the Olympians). And if your character doesn’t find what he is looking for, or you don’t end your story adequately, expect to receive millions of individual pieces of hate mail (Lionboy). 4. Make your prose fast, furious and dangerous, from beginning to end, with small lulls in between. Set your scene, introduce your character and give the reader a taste of what’s to come within the first page. Let’s just get on with it, okay? Keep it pacy and exciting (not introspective) at least until your boy readers are in their forties and need to slow down a bit. 5. The Captain Underpants series and the Andy Griffiths books (The Day My Bum Went Psycho, Zombie Bums from Uranus) work well as adventure stories combined with silliness or revoltingness. If you can’t cope with writing silliness, you can still use your own sense of humour, with unexpected twists and turns (Paul Jennings’ short stories). Humour even works well in serious books that deal with difficult subjects (See Ya Later, Simon, and Two Weeks with the Queen). 6. Boys read the Guinness Book of Records from cover-to-cover because they love facts. That’s why non-fiction combines with fiction in series like Horrible Histories and why the new cosmology chapter book series by Stephen and Lucy Hawking is a big hit (George’s Secret Guide to the Universe). Use what you know but still keep the ‘story’ the most important focus. 7. Hang around with kids and watch TV to figure out what random things they’re into. The best children’s writers are people who think like kids. If you can do this, you can probably write conversations that sound “like, authentically awesome.” 8. Boys are funny little creatures. When they find out a book has been written by a girl, it’s like “A GIRL! Well, that’s gonna be dull city.” If your first name is Joanna and your last name is Rowling the way to cope with this is to call yourself J.K. Rowling and cross your fingers. The woman writing the best-selling Zac Power series used her first name Hilary in the form of H.I. Larry. Of course, if your name is too dull to even contemplate using it, you can always invent a name like Lemony Snicket and name your books something that implies ‘disaster’ (A Series of Unfortunate Events). If you do all this, and produce the next bestselling series about underpants OR intestinal worms, I hope you’ll do me the honour of putting my ‘pocket guide’ on your acknowledgements page. 6 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 11, 2009: Dung Kai Cheung (Hong Kong), Yasser Abdel-Latif (Egypt), Kathy White (New Zealand), Mabrouck Rachedi (France) and Fedosy Santaella (Venezuela) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Mabrouck Rachedi WORKSHOPS AS WEAPONS OF MASS TRANSMISSION “Once upon a time is what the fence dividing up a mountain range announces, in lines at once irregular and even” - Brilliant Water, Christopher Merrill In the French suburbs, violence, unemployment, and the number of single-parent families are higher than everywhere else1. Of course I’m not speaking about the wealthy suburbs like Neuilly, the city of French president Sarkozy, but about the so-called “banlieues”, the equivalent of the American “inner cities”, except that they are located at the peripheries of major cities. Many people, including in France, discovered this social reality during the riots of November 2005, which set ablaze hundreds of under-privileged neighborhoods2. That’s the kind of place I live in now and where I teach the majority of my writing workshops. Since my first book was published, in 2006, I have directed writing workshops in a dozen or so elementary schools and junior high schools. On the outskirts of big cities, people are mainly of immigrant descent and Caucasians often represent a minority. Some of my classes are exclusively made up of people coming from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. My writing workshops are as much – if not more – related to social action than strictly to literary culture. Instead of trying to apply elaborate and academic criteria, I try to establish culture as a first bridge, a vector of socialization. I tend to adapt my teaching to my public who, in the words of linguist Alain Bentolila, “live with 400 words.”3 He further notes that “between 12 and 15% of today’s youth use exclusively the language of the “técis” the argotic word for cités, or suburbs,” while an average 18 year-old French teenager speaks with 1500 words4. During the workshops, I let the 10 to 18 year-olds express their creativity in “free styles.” In a given situation, I come up with a role-play, with a setting that includes as many characters as there are students. As opposed to a more traditional teacher, I insist on the fact that creation is a noisy process, and ideas must come out as they go through the children’s minds. The magic words: no censorship. However, creativity does not mean anarchy; each kid must come up with his or her own psychology for the character, while considering that he or she is a part of a whole. They then conduct a dialogue in search of balance and coherence. In short, they recreate the 1 Unemployment rate in certain districts: 40%, a figure recently quoted on TV by Brice Hortefeux, Minister of Interior Department . In 1999, singleparent families represented 15% of the household while the French average is 8% (Source : Observatoire National des Zones Urbaines Sensibles). 2 As the nearly 20 different ministers in charge of urban policy since 1990 illustrate, France has experienced what could be called a 40-year paralysis in the domain of urban policy. And to this day, one can’t stress enough the divide between what was supposedly going to be a Marshall plan for the suburbs as promised by Sarkozy during his presidential campaign and the reality of the modest “Hope for the Suburbs” plan that was carried out. 3 “Le Monde ” - 03.09.2005 - “Vivre avec 400 words”, Frederic Potet. 4 Source : Luc Fayard, teacher at the University of Dauphine. 7 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 11, 2009: Dung Kai Cheung (Hong Kong), Yasser Abdel-Latif (Egypt), Kathy White (New Zealand), Mabrouck Rachedi (France) and Fedosy Santaella (Venezuela) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu different steps that occur in the mind of an author. Finally, several readings are necessary to polish the text, to get rid of repetitions, and to erase inconsistencies. This can be tiresome and painful, but a reading by several voices validates the final work. The result is often brilliant. It is also a true testimony of the creativity and the nonconformist views that make up the real– but unexploited - talent of these young people in the suburbs. I also teach 18 to 23 year-olds who dropped out of school at around 14. They are all immigrant descendants born in France, who speak French mixed with the language of the “técis”. They are unskilled workers, but they fund an association for the promotion of culture in the suburbs. With them, I proceed in a different manner. For example, I organized a meeting with the award-winning Gilbert Sinoué, author of historical novels. At the beginning of the adventure, it seemed impossible to these teenagers that a famous writer would come to visit them in the projects. I had to fight the idea that literature is a field from which they were and would necessarily remain excluded. To do so, I explained that if I, Mabrouck Rachedi, from the suburb could be invited everywhere in France, then writers from the rest of France could also come to the suburbs. Though this may seem like common sense, it was not at all obvious to them. If anything, this shows one of the invisible fences inhibiting any action in France’s popular districts. Sinoué happily agreed to take part in a debate. More than fifty people participated in the meeting, which was led by French immigrant teenagers. We were far from rap concerts or soccer games. Furthermore, the experience changed the lives of some of these guys, one of whom is writing his own novel, and who has even developed a mentor-student relationship with Sinoué. I also work with schools away from the suburbs to counter clichés of violence. When I ask people who live in rural or wealthy areas what they think about the suburbs, they immediately repeat what they see on TV. It often is a shocker for them to learn that I still live in a suburb, though I don’t speak with the typical accent from the ‘hood’ and I’m rather a calm person. Plus, I even have a pretty good sense of humor at times, imagine that! I also taught them that the so-called “urban literature” movement which I am often associated with does not merely consist in writing as one speaks, that it to say by artificially using curse words or “yo” everywhere. Instead, it is a true, painful, and difficult endeavor which requires complex techniques, a sense of rhythm, poetry and inventiveness. It is not about writing a compilation of expressions heard on TV onto a white page. In this case, my goal is to deconstruct the stereotypes about urban literature or what’s closely related to the stereotypes of the suburbs. In conclusion, I think, like Elizabeth Auclair5, a teacher at the University of Cergy Pontoise that cultural actions are “a way to rebuild individual and collective identities, but also to give credit to the identities of the 5 From Elizabeth Auclair’s “Offres et demandes culturelles, ou la spécificité du développement culturel en banlieue » (“Cultural supply and demand, or the specificity of cultural development in suburbs”) in “ Situations de banlieues. Enseignement, langues, cultures” (“Suburban Situations. Teaching, Languages, Cultures”) directed by Marie-Madeleine Bertucci et Violaine Houdart-Merot, collection Éducation, politiques, sociétés, INRP, 2005. 8 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 11, 2009: Dung Kai Cheung (Hong Kong), Yasser Abdel-Latif (Egypt), Kathy White (New Zealand), Mabrouck Rachedi (France) and Fedosy Santaella (Venezuela) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu suburbs, too often strongly stigmatized. Art can also be a tool for socialization, even for social and professional integration”. This is the reason I use my pen as a weapon of mass expression and my little knowledge as a weapon of mass transmission. Fedosy Santaella THE COMPLEX SIMPLICITY OF TEACHING FICTION WRITING Structures Let's say, before I begin, that this all is based on my personal experience. I've been tinkering in this way, and I teach what I learn. So, in this strange work of trying to teach fiction writing, I have met certain needs that people have. And when I say people I am talking about engineers, lawyers, accountants; people from scientific and humanistic professions that have nothing to do with creative writing. I know this will sound obvious, but people who want to learn to write, must write. I say this seriously, because back in Venezuela I've known more than a few “theoretical” writing workshop professors who teach only high voltage theory or something else suspicious taken from Wikipedia. For example, if you search for “hero” in the Spanish Wikipedia, you will find information that is not bad, but very superficial. And if you take this information and teach with it, you are not doing anything really important, and also you are cheating your students. Theories are good, of course, and I think we must know them during the workshop, but they cannot cover the entire workshop or even a large part of it. Often a person who is beginning to write doesn’t know that to write fiction is to assemble a structure, which is what I think and what I teach. They come to writing with lots of innocence. However, angels are full of good intentions, and so is the road to hell. Thus, one of the first things I say in my workshops produces a disaster for some very respectable ladies and causes nervous laughter in the rest of the room: I say that writing belongs to the forces of evil. A writer, I continue, should be wicked. This does not mean that they cannot write love stories. You can write the most beautiful love story ever told, but you must still be evil enough to know how to tell the history and keep the reader trapped until the end of the text. Part of this evil is in the structures. Now, you may wonder what structures I'm talking about. They are the narrator, the point of view, grammar... I talk about the importance of maintaining the logical cohesion of detail, and I also make my students understand they can take structures for creative writing from elsewhere. I speak then, for example, about instruction manuals, or biographies, which are descriptive texts, and make the students see that they can take all of these like empty boxes and put fiction inside them. Then, I read them the famous instruction manuals of Julio Cortázar in Historias de Cronopios y famas (Cronopios and Famas), which include instructions as varied as How to Cry, How to Kill 9 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, September 11, 2009: Dung Kai Cheung (Hong Kong), Yasser Abdel-Latif (Egypt), Kathy White (New Zealand), Mabrouck Rachedi (France) and Fedosy Santaella (Venezuela) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Ants in Rome, and How to Comb the Hair. After that, I ask the students to write “instructions not to go crazy”. The results are wonderful in most cases. I think it’s because everybody knows how to become crazy, but not how to get out of there. My students also find screenwriting structures helpful. I teach the basic paradigm presented by Syd Field in his book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. I talk about the three moments in history according to Field: setup, confrontation and resolution, and about plot-points. I also emphasize the need of the character, and how actions define both the character and the need. I insist on action. I do this, because I think when the novice writer tries to write a character subjectively, the interior voice becomes drawn and falsely exquisite, and so mediocre. Like the old Chinese masters of martial arts, I think we should start hauling the bucket of water uphill before giving the first punch. I think you have to be orthodox, and not allow very “literary” detours. Stories My hope is for people to tell stories, and forget, initially, the theme. By theme I mean a superior intellectual, philosophical thinking that goes beneath the text. People want to tell a story; whether about death, suicide, madness, infidelity, fatherhood... But thinking about these complex things (the theme, let’s say again) can cause people to run out of fuel, and then they become terrified of the road and stop. The theme is a serial killer of stories. Narrative is the art of storytelling. Sometimes writers forget that it is extremely difficult to tell a good story. Sometimes people who talk about “art” and “themes” and “inner speech” in literature forget, for example, that Cervantes wrote for the people, and that Shakespeare also wrote for the people, and, moreover, for a theater audience. I do not see why you cannot find your inner needs in the stories you tell. Simplicity To teach writing, especially to the “ordinary” people I mentioned earlier, I think we should start from the simple and practical. I ask people to write and also to read literature. Reading is also important, reading literature, not cheap Wikipedia theories. John Maeda, in The Laws of Simplicity, says that simplicity equals sanity. But beware. We should not take this simplicity lightly. Maeda says: “Through my ongoing journey I've discovered how complex a topic Simplicity really is, and I do not pretend to have solved the puzzle.” Teaching simplicity is a complex issue that I must keep considering. And for now, I'm still on the road, learning. |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving image |
| Type (AAT) |
Presentations (Communicative events) |
| Duration | 01:26:59 |
| Language | English |
| Digital Collection | Virtual Writing University Archive |
| Contributing Institution | Iowa City Public Library |
| Subcollection |
International Writing Program Collection |
| Rights Management | Educational use only, no other rights given. U.S. and international copyright laws may protect this digital object. Commercial use or distribution of the object is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. |
| Contact Information | Contact the VWU Webmaster: http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/main/info/25/ |
| Date Digital | 2009 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_09-11-09.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_09-11-09.mpg |
Description
| Title | Teaching writing 2009 Video, 700k |
| Type (DCMIType) |
Moving image |
| Type (IMT) |
mp4 |
| Duration | 01:26:59 |
| Digitization Specifications | Created as MPEG2 and converted to mp4 for streaming. |
| Date Digital | 2009-09-11 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_09-11-09.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_09-11-09.mpg |
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