Critique

Thanks for a good critique on Wednesday. I hope it was helpful to have a moment to react to each other's work and thought processes. On Monday we will look at Zoe, Aaron, and Tom's work, and spend the rest of the evening working.

Brief re-cap of schedule of next few weeks:

M (20th): Finish critique, work
W (22d): Meg in LA. Work.

M (27th): work
W (29th): work

M (5 Mar): BLITZ CRIT
W (7 Mar): Crit debrief; professional practices

On writing fiction

Here is an interview with Philip Roth, where he discusses some of the challenging of starting his books. It struck me as very similar to the processes that many of you are struggling with now.

Beginning a book is unpleasant. I’m entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything. I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it—that’s what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book. I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book.

Lecture: Kristen Martincic, Thursday 9 Feb, 4:15pm

The Marvin Bileck Printmaking Project at Bowdoin College presents an artist's talk by:

Kristen Martincic
Thursday, Feb 9th, 2012
Beam Classroom, VAC
4:15 PM

Schedule

Reminder:

Our first critique as a class will take place next Wednesday (Feb. 15). Between now and then, mission=work!