New Poetry Webpage

Attention Poetry Students:

You should have received an email from me by now about the course. You should have also received an invitation to share a Google Drive folder, in order to turn your work in to me. (If you haven't received either, please email me and I'll set you right.)

I have created a new site just for the poetry students, so any future messages or assignments can be found here: www.bsuengl491poetry.blogspot.com

I'll be waiting for an email from you tomorrow.

All best,

Cynthia

Wait Up

I've been stuck in very slow moving traffic on Chinden Blvd for the past 30 minutes. If I don't make it to class by 9, sit tight and wait for me! I'm coming!

The Poetry Edition

There are a few of you now in this class you are going to study poetry instead of fiction. If this is the case, the first thing you should do is buy this book:

You're going to be required to read this book this semester, week by week. You will also be required to read one other craft book, of your choosing, that you will present to your fellow poetry students in the weeks to come. I will post a list of suggestions sometime later this week. In addition, you should gather up at least 2 published collections of poetry that you will be sharing and reading during the class. I don't have any restrictions about this, except that I would prefer these collections be new to you--i.e., that you haven't read them before this class.

Here's the schedule for the poetry version of the class. Please bookmark it for future reference.

I'll see you tomorrow and we'll try to get an idea of how many of you there are, and what changes will need to be made to this schedule.

It will be an adventure.

CH

Writing Yourself An Edit Letter

Every time I write a book, I revise it as much as I can, and then I send it off to my editor at HarperTeen. She reads it, makes a bunch of notes, and then sends me the dreaded EDIT LETTER. This usually runs between 7-20 single spaced typed pages. (When it’s 20, I usually cry at some point; it’s so upsetting to know there’s 20 pages of what’s wrong with my book. But then I get over myself and get to work.) We do several rounds of edit letters over the next several months, but the first one is always the hardest. (Click here to read my editor’s initial edit letter on my novel THE LAST TIME WE SAY GOODBYE. Please OPEN IT all the way in Google docs so you can see my comments on it.)

You don’t have the luxury of having your own professional editor, (YET) so in this class I’m going to ask you to write your own edit letters as we get started. That way you and I will both have a framework to go by as you move forward working on your stories.

Use the following guidelines to write your letter.

1.    Start with what you like about the story. We all think our writing is total crap at some point, but it doesn’t do you much good to start revising a story if you don’t find anything you like about it. Write about why you started writing the story, what you wanted to accomplish, and what you felt you succeeded at. You should list what your favorite scene is, and why. What your favorite line is, and why.

2.    Look for surprises. Usually the best moments in my stories come from my subconscious—they are unplanned moments that surprise me when they appear on the page. Recognizing those moments can be key to figuring out what works in your story.

3.    Think about the macro. In this edit letter, I want you to think about the larger elements of the story, not the small ones. I want you to think about plot, not grammar. Character, not wording. So try to focus, for the moment, on the bigger picture.

4.    Address your biggest concern. If you read Erica’s edit letter to me, you’ll see that she begins with the positive, but then she very quickly moves on to her concerns, starting with the biggest and moving to the smallest. In writing your own edit letter, begin the critical part of the letter by discussing what you think of as the story’s biggest flaw. (For me this is usually plot or pacing, or the story feeling a certain way in a section when it should feel another way.) Then move on to describe the other problems that you see.

5.    The characters. In every edit letter I get there is always a section discussing each character—what the editor liked about that character, sure, but also ways the character could be improved upon or the motivations of that character made clear. Write a bit about your main characters, what is working for them and what could be better.

6.    Come up with a plan of action. My editor doesn’t generally tell me how to fix the problems in my novels—she just points them out and leaves me to figure out how to fix them. But every once in a while she has a revelatory idea that changes everything. What I want you to do, after you’ve taken a good hard critical look at your story, is to write up a plan—what steps will you take in revising this story? What are your priorities? What are you excited to work on?

7.    Don’t be too hard on yourself. Drafts are never perfect. Don’t let your letter become about how much you suck as a writer. If my editor wrote letters like that, I’d be devastated and hurry to find a new editor. Be kind to yourself. Allow yourself to get excited about how much better your story is going to become after you work on it.

For now, just write a letter for the story you plan to work on first. We’ll get to the other one a little later. And if the whole thing is starting to feel a little overwhelming, remember that REVISION is where the real work of writing happens. REVISION is what separates amateur writers from professionals. REVISION IS WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT.

Good luck! See you tomorrow.

Welcome

Welcome to English 491: Senior Portfolio in Creative Writing!

I'm Cynthia Hand, the instructor for the course. See the Professor page for more information about me and how you can get in contact with me.

Take a few minutes to maneuver around this website—this is the cornerstone of the class, and you should read every bit of it and continue to check it obsessively all semester. I often post little extras--articles and resources I think will be helpful to you, so please check back often to make the most out of this class.

Then take a minute to purchase the book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. It will not be available at the BSU bookstore, (because this course was assigned for me to teach on Thursday) so buy it now by clicking on the book in the column on your right. You’ll be expected to have read Chapter One by January 23. I’d prefer you to purchase the paperback copy, because we’ll be flipping though it a lot during class.

So, a little basic information about the course. In this class we will:

•   Revise! This class is all about revising the stories and/or novels you’ve been working on in all of your fiction writing courses up to this point. While you are free to write entirely new stories for class if you feel the need to, this course is focused on revision. Over the next fifteen weeks you'll revise and workshop two or three literary short stories (or a thirty page novel excerpt), the goal being that at the end of the course you will have a high quality portfolio of your very best work.

•   Read. At the end of this class you'll have read two collections of short stories, a book on the craft, and a book on revision, not including the unpublished stories you’ll read for workshop. Happily, these will largely be books you’ve chosen for yourself to suit your particular needs as a writer.  (Have you always wanted to read John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction or Stephen King’s On Writing? Now’s your chance.) 

•   Learn a whole bunch of revision techniques. Because:

•   Did I mention that we’re going to be revising? Every week you’ll bring in your stories to work on making them better, both at the macro level (where the big, wrecking-ball kind of revision takes place) and at the micro level (where we focus on sentence structure and word choice). Think of it as boot camp for your fiction.

Check out the Syllabus and the Schedule for more information. Also, please fill out the Google form here, which will help me stay in touch with you throughout the semester.

I, for one, am excited to get started. See you tomorrow.