Due Oct 26
1. Read: “Jon” by George Saunders (Zonda presentation)
And “Islands” by Alexander Hemon (Angry Beavers presentation)
2. Half Page critiques of six student rough drafts (tbd). Scan for: rhythm, diction, stereotypicality, (im)plausibility, duration.
Due Oct 19
1. Read: “The Palatski Man” by Stuart Dybek (Chip n’ Dales presentation)
And “Real Estate” by Laurie Moore (Jotrseth presentation)
2. Half Page critiques of six student rough drafts (tbd). Scan for: rhythm, diction, stereotypicality, (im)plausibility, duration.
Homework, Due Oct 12
1. Read: “Everything Ravaged Everything Burned” by Wells Tower (Zonda presentation)
And “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor (The Fujiis Presentation)
2. Rough Draft of your short story – bring a copy for everyone in class. 4-5 pages. Name/date/ “Rough Draft”/ stapled.
Needs beginning/middle/end.
Homework, Due Oct 5
1. Read: “The Knife Thrower” by Steven Millhauser (Chip n Dale’s presentation)
And “Second Lives” by Daniel Alarcón (Angry Beavers Presentation)
2. Write: an everyday scene with multiple characters, dialogue, and access to one or more characters’ internal state and thoughts. Write the same scene from different points of view and tenses. Make sure that one of your points of view is third person, making use of indirect discourse. Also make sure you experiment with a tense/POV you’ve never written in.
Due Sept 28
1. Read: “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” by Sherman Alexie
And “Break It Down” by Lydia Davis
Write either:
A character’s monologue that serves as a fluid character sketch in which the line between internal and external is blurred and the character’s self-presentation continues to surprise just enough to keep a masterful knowledge or categorization of the character just out of reach
or
a scene in which a main character gradually forms an unreliable or fantasized interpretation of a situation, and despite the factual inaccuracy of that interpretation, it contains a deeper truth.
Due Sept 21
1. Read: “Fleur” by Louise Erdrich
And “Mirror Ball” by Mary Gaitskill
2. Write either:
A synthetic narration telling the various rumored, ambiguous, and/or contradictory accounts of a fabled character
or
A scene from a relationship in which each character is analyzed meticulously by the narration according to invisible dynamics.
Due Sept 14th
1. Read: “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin (Group presentation next week by Jotrseth)
And “Carlo Doesn’t Know How to Read” by Giulio Mozzi (Group Presentation next week by The Fujiis)
2. Write a short scene in which, in the midst of other activities, a narrator or character wonders/speculates/worries/fears/longs for/curses another character
or
3. Write a short scene in which a character receives some very bad or very good news. Show us the character going about her day, digesting the news. Try to delay giving us the actual news for a while, playing with that tension.
Liberal Arts 110: 13/ Narrative Storytelling
Wednesday 12-2:50
625 Sutter St., rm 140
Instructor: Christian Nagler
christianrileynagler@gmail.com
“The task of writing is at the same time heartrending and joyful. It is the discovery of one’s own imagination, of the associations and the creative powers implicit in language, and a meticulous confrontation with something so denigrated and surprising as words can be. The word is our tool and our enemy at the same time.”
Luisa Valenzuela
“The intention of the writer is to hold the reader to a sense of the weight of each action. The writer cannot be sure that his readers will view the matter as he does. He therefore tries to define an audience. By assuming what it is that all men ought to be able to understand and agree upon, he creates a kind of humanity, a version of it composed of hopes and realities in proportions that vary as his degree of optimism … The writer must find enduring intuitions of what things are real and what things are important. His business is with these enduring intuitions which have the power to recognize occasions of suffering or occasions of happiness, in spite of all distortion and blearing.”
Saul Bellow
“To lift our subject out of the sphere of anecdote and place it in the sphere of drama, we supply it with a large lucid reflector, which we find only in that mind and soul concerned in the business that have at once the highest sensibility and the highest capacity, or that are … most admirably agitated.
Henry James
“To speak of a novel is like speaking of the sea. The novel simply needs to be written. Dogmatic pronouncements are useless.
There is no point in trying to fit it into a Procrustean bed. And no one should forget its inexhaustible sources—of action, of aesthetic beauty, of sustained interest.”
Camilo José Cela
