Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Son of EWW

Son of EWW

After seeing my blog yesterday Karen provided an insightful comment. She said maybe there is room inside the current course, if I cut out some of the fluff and redundancy to fit in some of the things I mentioned. Looking back at some of the course objectives I think she is right. As time permits I will be working on making the course more concentrated with some of the better ideas that keep bubbling up.

Linda and I have been going to see some more movies this week. We saw “Red Tails” and “The Grey.” In Red Tails the visual effects were dazzling but the story line and characters were nothing to get excited about. In The Grey, the scenery was beautiful but again not a whole lot that interested us.

As I have mentioned, Linda and I are hooked on the TV series Justified. Last night I read the first part of the book Rayland Givens, upon which the series is based. If you want to see some good materials and examples on how to develop characters it is there in abundance. Still if you want to see a good example of the story telling model, I have to refer you to Real Steel. The treatment might not make it the greatest story ever told but the arrangement and use of components makes it an amazing rendition of the story telling model.

As I write the EWW vignette reviews I have a pile of references I use and I have mentioned in the past that I like the Dummy and Idiot books. Like most “How to Write” books they have a lot of space where they ramble on not really telling the reader much about what they want to know. For example one that I am reading now is talking about all the genres and how they are different from one another…In doing the reviews this is useful information because all my students are from a different genre. I have Gothic Horror, Action Adventure, Period Romance, Detective, Biographical, and Children’s Lit. So before I start doing the review I read the section that gives pointers in writing in each genre.

These give me something useful to examine in general comments that regard tactical writing. However the EWW isn’t so much about tactical writing but is more focused on the operational and strategic components. The students tend to be fixated on tactical writing but the whole point of the workshop is to get them thinking about how chapters go together and how to develop and plug in some of the strategic aspects. This stuff doesn’t happen by accident and needs to be planned and poked into the outline that allows the writer to write in bite sized chunks.

So after some general comments I write a review based upon the lesson objectives, prompts and checklists provided in each lesson. For the most part I am lucky if the student has written one thing in their vignette that addresses the requirements of the lesson. What most are doing is taking something already written and after procrastinating most of the week submit what they have or marginally adapt, to meet the deadline. I don’t mind this too much, in that I am not a Jesuit Priest and I see value in what they are doing even if it is contrary to what I’m asking them to write. They do seem for the most part to be meeting me half way and no doubt will learn by some sort of back door realization…probably long after the course ends, some of the things I am trying to point out. The reason I am not too indignant is because I was pretty much the same type of student that I have in my classes. It was usually long after a course was over that the light came on. Statistics is a great example of this happening. So I am not lamenting because I am having fun and learning is taking place and the students are adapting the material to suit their individual needs, even though it is not happening quite according to my expectations. Rather than sap the joy I am riding the curl and sort of herding them to the end where we will be writing the outlines designed to pull the whole she-bang together. That is where I believe the rubber is going to meet the road.