Miscellaneous Chatter > Writing
Week 1: Start with endings
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---As there are at least three of us who wish to improve our craft, I thought I'd start this series of weeklies - how exactly punctual I will be, I don't know.
The good thing about the paragraph exercises I was telling sciborg about is that they force you to write, within a constraint, with a limited degree of creative freedom.
I hope my teacher doesn't mind me sharing his wisdom. I'll try and make up some of my own writing weeklies rather than just wholesale jacking his, admittedly loose, curriculum.
Start with endings:
I can remember for years and years of studying writing, takes classes, courses, contests, there has been the prevalent attitude about beginnings. Instructors always seem to latch onto the idea of the perfect opening lines - literally, a hit-list of "great opening sentences" runs through my head thinking about this.
However, my latest teacher turned this assumption on its head and advocated taking our epic one-liners and making them endings.
You'd be amazed the patterns and ideas that suddenly emerge when your scratching your brain to work towards a goal, rather than constantly inventing material to top yourself.
We can discuss more of the class insight after as it comes up but I feel like the experiences speaks volumes.
Cheers.
These two paragraphs are off the top of my dome. The ending sentences are from a common phrase - though, I strangely think I've ripped this version from Neuropath - and from a epigraph I have for a fanfic piece I've been writing for TPB. I figured a week was good to do two, online, for criticism and chatter to develop. We did one a day for homework in my class.
1. Death always comes a stranger.
2. Revelation is simply another flavor of ignorance.
1. The sword point rested against his neck. He turned, feeling numb. His eyes followed the shining length of steel, not bronze, to an armored figure framed by burning sun. The figure removed her helm and dropped it to bloody grasses atop the mound. And he knew that he looked at the mask, that the face from a thousand memories, cast in innumerable molds, were all versions of this lie that was her truth. He found himself on his knees, looking up the folded blade to the face of a woman he'd once loved. The face of a stranger. Death always comes a stranger.
2. The sounds are discordant, reverberating the plaster chipped walls around the Grand Piano. I struggle to move my fingers in time to the relentless metronome but my hands simply fumble across the cold ivory keys, aping the beautiful symbiosis of harmony, of finesse. They seem crabbed strangers, creatures who've come to taunt and remind of yesterday, always yesterday. I pound these arthritic claws across music's yin-yang. My mind is clear. Purposeful. Obsessive. Until they relent. Until the slip and crunch of sounds becomes the flowing voice of melody. Until my fingers, my hands, become the very instrument I am playing. Until I remember that I will forget. Revelation is simply another flavor of ignorance.
Edit: The sounds were discordant -> The sounds are discordant.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: sciborg2 ---ETA: Both piece are intriguing, I can see them being poignant finales, just hard to gage endings divorced from stories.
I'll confess, both last phrases seem to be going for a Zen koan "paradox", and in both cases I'm confused as to what they are supposed to explain in context of their paragraphs.
I'll think of more to say but also note that "crabbed strangers" feels awkward, as does "music's yin-yang".
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---I think the ambiguity of the sentences and context is part of the experience of writing in paragraphs like this. The sentences as endings are automatically meaningless until framed by the paragraph.
Start with endings. Make up your own if you like rather than using mine. The point is to see how your writing is shaped by working towards one particular sentence rather than from one particular sentence.
--- Quote from: sciborg2 ---I'll think of more to say but also note that "crabbed strangers" feels awkward, as does "music's yin-yang".
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It's things like this that I think are ultimately important to our discussion. These are actually both parts I spent time toying with different metaphors and analogies. I wanted to suggest rigidity and the music's yin-yang was an unsuccessful play off the colour of a piano's keys.
Thanks, sci. I will take a look at your stories. I've read them through but I feel so ill-prepared to give criticism. You made it seem effortless and tactful, though.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Callan S. ---For some reason it reminds me of how the first star wars movie to come out was actually the 4th. The whole of a new hope was kind of the big ending of three other (at the time, unmade) movies. That also reminds me of how much prior history Earwa seems to have before the PON series. I'm wondering if that's a writing technique as well - a whole lot of story that just isn't shown, it's simply the build up - an ending upon which the latter published books are entirely about.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: sciborg2 ---Madness - Gotcha. I'm curious, is it supposed to be Death always comes [as] a stranger? (I do think I remember that in the parts of Neuropath I did read.)
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