Week Nine: For the Time Being Activity Week
""Within the grand structure of an article or book, the writers works to make each section cohere within itself, cohere with other parts, and to give some measure of aesthetic beauty and unity to the whole. A more delicate metaphor says that good writing requires a thread of coherent logic along which are strung beads of thought. Done well, the necklace coheres ... and gives beauty to the wearer and the evening" (Cheney 147).
Up to this point this term, we have worked on the details of our work, the individual components, to ensure that our reader is engaged with our words and stories. This week, we will shift from the microstructures of shots, scenes, and sequences to consider the macrostructure of how our nonfiction works as a whole.
For the Time Being uses a combination of Cheney's "Convergent Narrative Structure" and his "Spiral Structure" to create separate worlds (Clouds, Sand, etc.) which are loosely narrative but also touch on the themes, characters, and images of other worlds.
Cheney states that a writer should "know the ending before you begin writing" (148). In Week Three, we set our intentions for writing by creating a dominant impression, the overall feeling or thoughts that we would like our reader to have at the end of our work. This week, we return to that dominant impression and start to more concretely scaffold our individual chunks of writing into a more organized structure. In doing so, we will consider how the scenes of our stories work together along the strand of the necklace we are creating, and work toward making a more coherent whole from the sum of the parts. |
9.1: Writing Activity #3
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Before you complete this activity, read Cheney's Writing Creative Nonfiction Chapter 9: Structures (pp. 147-174).
This week's activity will help us to 1) identify what purpose the parts of the story we have created so far serves and 2) highlight where we need additional structure so that we smoothly get the reader from beginning to end. To complete this week's activity, do the following:
For those of you who are working on two disconnected works, do the same with the second piece that you will be working on in the remainder of the class. Share your organizational drafts with me by Sunday at 11:59 p.m. in Google Docs. |