Monday, October 14, 2013

Incorporating Place

As part of one of today's in-class exercises, you were asked to incorporate place-related words from a list you made into a paragraph. Did you find incorporating those words into what you had already written easy or hard? What did you learn about the process of making the concept of place a more prominent part of a piece of writing? Did the exercise change your views on any part of the writing process? What did you find most useful about this part of the exercise?

9 comments:

  1. So in class yesterday I wrote about the area just outside my flat in Cambridge when I went to England last summer. The exercises became much more interesting when I realized that the words I wrote as being "integral" to my perception of the place almost didn't show up in my first draft of the piece at all. Even stranger, when I added them, it felt like I hadn't improved the description! It did give me a list of things to consider when I write location, though. Descriptions of character and location are pretty interlinked, so ignoring one or the other makes the story less robust. I'm going to have to go back on the stuff I've been writing recently and see if the city/house/room have as much a place in the dialogue as the characters. If not, there's some fun work to be done!

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  2. I wrote about my childhood backyard, and the swing on my favorite tree. I noticed that I automatically incorporated most of the necessary "place" words on the first try. After I made the list of words, they helped me laser my focus more narrowly on what described the swing and the tree, instead of the surrounding yard and house. The exercise helped me notice the difference between how good and bad writers establish location in such a subtle way that I should envision the place without realizing what I'm doing. The poetry aspect was also interesting, since it should be much more dense with imagery. To write a poem, I had to pick out the most visually appealing words and phrases, and it was helpful having the original author make sure to sprinkle in such phrases beforehand so I would really have an image to work with.

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  3. I noticed that I incorporated a lot more of the five senses the second time I wrote my paragraph. The first time I was really focused on what I saw, and of course that was important, but I hadn't thought about how much more there was to my experience than what I saw. I wrote about having a picnic in an English garden just outside of a castle, and in my first paragraph I tried to describe a lot of what I saw. But then I thought about the food that I ate and the sounds that I heard, and I added those in my second paragraph. A group of ducks arrived and really stole the show, even though we were in the most beautiful surroundings. It's funny how that works. I think I could still make my paragraph even better, if I were to rewrite it. I'm very grateful that we did this exercise because I feel more aware of details that I should include in my writing.

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  4. On Monday, I wrote a piece about my first visit to the beach while visiting family in California. When I wrote the first paragraph, I focused a lot more on the drive to the beach and how I felt as we approached. After we did the second part of the exercise, I realized I was trying to cover too much in only one paragraph so I narrowed it down to when I actually stepped on the sand and entered the water. I realized how much more detail I could incorporate if I narrowed down the setting rather than trying to cover the street, the shops, the beach, and the ocean all in one.

    Like you Katherine, I was also surprised that the words that I thought were essential to the description of the place were not included in the first draft. My second draft did include more of those words because I was a lot more aware of them as I wrote the second piece.

    As far as changing my views on any part of the writing process, I now think it would be a good idea to make a list of nouns, adjectives, and verbs that I could add to a second draft. This feeds into what I found most useful about this exercise which is that adding descriptive words into your writing can really change the way your writings are read by someone else. Also, something in your writing that might seem like a minor detail to you might end up being what sticks to the reader the most.

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  5. I noticed when I was writing my first paragraph I was more focused on telling what had happened and not too much on the place. As I wrote my second paragraph I found it was easier to focus more on the setting and my different surroundings. Once I had my words it was easier to incorporate them in my story. I learned that I don’t focus too much on my setting and as some people said they would; I find it will be helpful to go back and really focus on my scenery and to sprinkle descriptions more into my story. For me I can picture where my characters are and where they are going, but to describe it to a reader is hard for me. I don’t want to be too descriptive and I don’t want to them to doubt where they are, because it is important to help the reader imagine the place, but no have too many restrictions on their imagination. I found writing down the words to describe the place, scene and atmosphere first and then going back and sprinkling them in my work was very helpful.

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  6. It was interesting to me, because there was very little change from my first paragraph to my second. To me, it was easy to get very into describing a single moment and a sense of that moment without telling a story. The words I chose were much more difficult to incorporate into my second paragraph, mostly because I did like what I had already written in my first. I thought that I had everything just right, but after a few minutes of thinking more about it, I realized that there were things that could have been added or other things that didn't really matter that would make it easier for a reader to feel a part of the place I was trying to create. Typically in my writing, I either write way too much about the setting or way to little. This exercise kind of helped me to find that balance between information that doesn't matter and won't add anything to the story, and information that is essential to understanding.

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  7. I wrote about my living room before we changed out the lights. It was really interesting writing about this memory because I was about six years old and the scene is vivid. I felt that if I had tried to describe the room without choosing a specific moment I wouldn't have been able to capture the image that I had of the room. This may have been because in the last twelve years the room has changed a great deal or because I feel that it is easier for me to use description when it is tied to emotion and occurrence. However, while writing this piece I feel like I used a lot of things that I wouldn't have written if I was writing a story. I wouldn't only because a lot of the descriptions bring nothing to the reader other than giving a more vivid image. I feel that a lot of the image can be drawn by the readers imagination and they wouldn't need nearly as much description and they may in fact feel controlled by my overly detailed descriptions. All in all it was a great experience and I feel that I learned a good deal about writing about scene and place.

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  8. I think I had a harder time incorporating my own words back into a work that I wrote in one take. I think it was mostly because I had the class/audience in mind, knowing full well that I was writing not for me but for someone else in the classroom. So when I was jotting down my thoughts, I kept asking myself how to make my thoughts more accessible to anyone else but myself. So I think I ended up confusing myself in that regard. And then there was the fact that I tried to capture every. single. aspect. of what I was thinking. So I sort of missed the mark there too! In any case, it was a challenge, and I can only imagine what authors have to go through to ensure that their readers can clearly follow not only the plot, or the character development, but the setting as well, which adds more than we realize!

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  9. I wrote about the time I was learning to drive and got distracted by a squirrel and bent the side view mirror of an old truck entire generations of my family had driven and scratched and dinged. When I started writing, my story was very situation driven, but after we had to incorporate the place-related words, I was able to focus on the setting a lot more. It was still a little difficult, because the story I was telling involved a situation and I couldn't really freeze time as much to just describe the setting. Looking back it might have been easier if, instead of telling the story as it happened, if I described the scene just after it had happened. Then I would have the same woods, the same truck, the same people (who were now laughing at me) and the bent mirror and a squirrel in a tree mocking me. That probably would have worked out better for the exercise.

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