WEEK 7: BRAIDING

Read: Kathy Acker p.779-794

NOW: Use the short sentences (#3 from last week) as the bones of this week's piece. Add flesh and muscle from the other two paragraphs. The idea is to write material and then to experiment with the ordering of the material. You need not use everything you wrote last week... or--feel free to add even more. Do a couple versions if you like...

Alternately, you can also use this exercise to generate more material for one of the pieces you have already done--to flesh it out and start building a final version for your portfolio.  For example... the first paragraph can be replaced with a more meditative/musing paragraph on any "larger implications" of a scene you are writing... you do not have to be writing about a large issue/event to use this "braid-form." Not at all. 

GOAL: To free ourselves from the tyranny of "how things come out onto the page" - Re-ordering/ fleshing out/accordian-ing thought: these can be your best friend if you let them... they certainly provide you with a ton of possibilities.

WEEK 6: MAKE THE STRANDS

WREAD: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter

Assignment (this will be in 2 parts... this week and next--for this week please compose the following

1. Write a chunky paragraph telling what the "big" event is (its nature). This is mostly expository background -- on a world event (presidential election, natural disaster, NASA discovery)... a media event (news story that caught your attention, celebrity death, etc)... or on a more localized "big deal" (your brother's wedding, a graduation, a concert or protest march). All that needs to happen here is that the event be beyond your sphere... affecting others in a profound way.  Write this paragraph in the 3rd person. (No mention of self.) Use the internet to do research on larger implications and to get facts right.

2. Write a paragraph of long sentence description of a setting--the place you were when you became aware of this event (or if you were somehow involved in the event). Describe the physicality of the scene. Do not mention yourself much, if at all. Put in as much sensory info as you can--all 5 senses if possible.

3. Write a 6-word-or-less sentence spine... a play by play of your actions when you heard about the event  - or a play-by-play your actions during a particularly compelling moment (if you were in the event). Even dialogue must be compressed to 6-word or less bursts.