Last night, I felt David Filipov's lecture was brilliant! I was thinking about his reference to 50 word paragraphs, moving the building blocks of the story around for sequencing and interest; flow.
I've offered a few notes about our spring issue of Grey Sparrow Journal below and the architecture of literary writing in sharp contrast to news writing.
First, the printed copies are in the repositories of Yale, NY, and UC Berkeley libraries and online at EBSCO as well as the Sparrow site--easily available for most with a computer. This issue, Pulitzer Prize Poet Tracy K. Smith offered a poem--we host a national treasure series every quarter. Professor Keith and his wife are from Boston and Professor Wexelblatt--Keith and Wexelbaltt teach at Boston U. Doctors and Smith have connection to Harvard.
http://greysparrowpress.sharepoint.com/Pages/default.aspx
A note about creative writing below follow and I've not covered even a small percentage of the elements.
Structure for poetry is heavy if one writes to form. A writer has to count each syllable and the stress/accent of those syllables to place words into iambs; kaBOOM is an example of an iamb with the stress on the second syllable e.g. a HORSE, a HORSE, a KINGdom FOR a HORSE. Spencerian sonnets, haiku, senryu, sestinas, blank verse... all require strong, specific strucutre--language is critical. I won't talk about rhyming. Stories may have plots, sub plots, character arcs, physical arcs... heavy literary reference, metaphor... ledes, closings... all with connection to a larger community. Frightfully difficult unless you are a Sylvia Plath who wrote a poem a day during a certain time in her life. There is nothing for sale here, our online journals are free, unless we consider Teasdale's words, "Life has loveliness to sell."
[An aside April 1st, I had four major deadlines, all of which I met, although I don't know how. I like to read and respond to blogs--great information. I was behind the curve over the last couple of weeks. Now, life is good. Grey Sparrow's spring literary journal has been released. I'm always proud of it--I have no creative writing in it and never have. I do write the intros.]
Please keep in mind, I'm proud of Grey Sparrow, but consider the gigantic leap I'm making from creative writing to news story writing. That said, whenever someone pulls a story or poem from the ether and writes, it is rarely easy! There is a joy, when a story or poem begin to form.
You can see, I'm learning a whole new skill set when it comes to news stories--heavy sigh.
ReplyDeleteI agree Diane that the 50 word paragraphs piece of advice was very helpful. Unfortunately, it also seems quite easy to forget in the heat of writing a story!
ReplyDeleteAngus, I get overwhelmed at times, but not like a reporter covering fast breaking news. Can't image what that is like.
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ReplyDeleteEdlyn, how kind. There are 15-20 volunteers at any given time--people help with reading submissions for a year. I'm a volunteer too. I do lay out the printed journal and online journal, but the readers and editors choose most of the work included for each issue--sometimes there's too much for them to read and evaluate, so I read too. I've been lucky-I've had a couple people stay since the inception of the journal. Most volunteers have held MFA's or BA's in writing or English. Right before the quarterly edition comes out, we're all just treading water. I had to repair a number of things at the site yesterday. I wish I had a big pot of cyberglue to hold things in place.
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