In the story I’m now working on (working title Capped), some software glitches (actually, algorithms in weak-AI software used on the stock exchange) causes a massive, worldwide economic crash (and especially one specific part of the world economic system) in the space of a few minutes. Ooops, then it happened in real life. Well, not as catastrophic (thank goodness) and not worldwide, and not with AIs exactly, but something eerily similar. So now I have to find a way that these circuit breakers could crash, or be overridden. Or something. That is, if my story is going to work in …
Tag: WRITING
You Do Realize That You’re Baring Your Soul To Me, Right?
I’d heard from others that teaching Creative Writing to undergrads, one tends to see things that those students don’t or can’t express anywhere else. In Canada, I recall hearing classes tended to have to wade through story after story of students’ first sexual experiences, of their best or worst sexual experiences, of imagined sexual experiences, and of course the perennial fantasies of sexual violence (mostly by male students). Well, I am happy to report that this isn’t my experience in Korea.
The First Album I Ever Bought For Myself
It was an LP. It was a soundtrack. I had that whole thing memorized a few days after I bought it. Later would come Glenn Miller (my mom’s choice, since I was about to start playing the saxophone), and then Bon Jovi (yes, Slippery When Wet, I’ll admit it), Miles Davis, Guns’N’Roses (and then the famous backpatch jacket), and then John Coltrane (and then the tenor sax I still have with me), and much more… … but this was the first album I bought for myself, with my paper route money, and man was I happy to have it so …
Names That Ain’t Workin’
When I first arrived in Korea and ran across one of those names (I think it was Beom Seok (read: Bum Suck) and mentioned it to other teachers, I was horrified by the story I heard of some kid in a hakwon class whose teacher giggled at his name, which indeed was something that sounded like “Bum Suck”; push came to shove and finally, when the parents found out that the name brought, to English speakers, images of someone sucking on a bum, they changed their kid’s name. I mean, talk about trauma. This isn’t an urban legend, as far …
The Uses of Doubt
I have been thinking about a story I drafted a while back — maybe a year ago, maybe 18 months ago, I can’t remember — and to which I haven’t yet gotten a chance to return, though I may soon. In any case, it’s a fantasy tale of two cultures — a low-tech patriarchal culture being overrun by a high-magic matriarchal culture. It was, in fact, inspired by what a Taiwanese student in one of my classes in 2008 wrote about the Taiwanese colonial experience — the way Taiwan in general experienced Japanese occupation, but also how the Chinese mainland …
Kick-Ass
I thought I’d posted this, but anyway: Kick Ass is a wonderful, wonderful superhero film. If you’re in Korea, see it while you can… it’s not some huge crappy film, so it won’t play for long! (I find films succeed more when they are mediocre, and less when they are wonderful, here: the same goes, very generally, for Korean films, unfortunately.) And yes, it does have the most violent little girl you’ve ever in your life seen. This is one of the film’s charms, and anyone who’s horrified by it needs to go kiss Frank D’Amico’s crooked, murderous ass. But …
Writing Double, Or Why You Should Try to Kill Two or More Birds With One Scene
So one of the things I’ve stressed a few times to my Creative Writing class — and I’m impressed, it only took a few times, now they’re calling on one another to try do it more — is killing several birds with one stone. If you’re writing a scene, you should always have more than one thing going on… something explicit, and something implicit. There’s the surface and then there’s the subtext. That’s the minimum. There’s a scene in the 2007 Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters1 where this is played out beautifully. One of the main characters, having just …
Moura — Drafted! (Finally.)
Whew! I finally got a draft done of a story I’ve been thinking about writing since 2006, and researching for the last few weeks. (Working title: “Moura” — the one about H.G. Wells’ last lover, and about… well, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you, now, would I? I don’t think the title will change, by the way, but who knows…?) I’m going to show it to a few friends and get some feedback, which is something I haven’t done so much lately with stories. But this is a different sort of story than I’ve written before. For those …
Character Balance
A while back, we were critiquing a story and the student’s character seemed a little too blessed for the story to be interesting. Everything she wanted, came true. She needed a place to stay, and someone immediately offered her one. She shared something from her culture with a person from another culture, and the person enthusiastically embraced it. (It was red bean paste. A quick survey of the room showed that about half the Korean students hate red bean paste as much as I do!) Over and over, people urged the author to push her character into a corner. Which …
Critting Protocols
Since a few people have expressed interest, I thought I’d post a little protocol for how to run a critique session in a class. The feedback routine is basically the procedure we used at Clarion West, as suggested by Maureen McHugh, though after a few weeks most of us tended to play a bit more loosely and freely with it. Basically: for a given crit session, students will have texts ahead of time, and are expected to have written a critique of each text to be critique, but also are expected to provide verbal critique. The critique session begins with …