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View Full Version : Complaining about my Creative Writing class again



Outrider
Apr 20, 2005, 04:47 PM
Here's the assignment I've had since Spring Break but I didn't start until this week and is due tomorrow evening:



This exercise should number no more than 10 double-spaced pages, 12p font (Times Roman).

WRITE a story featuring the following characters:

A parent (mother or father, but not both) whose only son recently died a violent death. The violence might be war, murder, suicide, police aggression, or any other type of assault. It may not be an accident, such as a car or plane crash. It must be some human-occasioned violence. Whatever your choice of violence, think of specifics: if war, was it a land mine, or grenade? If murder, was it a stabbing, strangling, shooting, burning? If suicide, what was the method? You may or may not need to provide this information in the story, but it will be important for you, the writer, as the shaper of this universe, to know.

This parent - mother or father - will always have possessed romantic and/or sexual longings for the son; those feelings will still be present after the son's death.

Another character will be a neighbor (female or male) of the parent. This neighbor will always have been in love with the son, for as long as she or he knew him. This reality will be complicated, however, by the neighbor's discovering, in the recent past, that the son once raped his/her younger sister/brother (younger sister or younger brother).

Lastly, you must somehow include ONE character from any of the following fictions (all on e-reserve). If the character doesn't have a name in the e-reserve fiction, you have the option of keeping them nameless in your work, or giving them a name:

Lessing, "To Room Nineteen"
Palacios, "A Gentleman on the Train"
Alexis, "My Anabasis"
Helen Lee, "Marriage Bones"

Or you may include a character - one - from any of the prose pieces in At the Bottom of the River (Kincaid), Yellow (Don Lee), or Aureole (Maso).

When you include the character from another writer's fiction, you will have to make that character somehow your own: that is, recognizably from the fiction you chose, but invincibly your own, for the purposes of this exercise.


Everybody in my class has to do this, so uh... none of us are happy.

Feel free to speculate on how insane my teacher is.

Sagasu
Apr 20, 2005, 05:11 PM
Good god, how dreadfully boring ._.

Mixfortune
Apr 20, 2005, 05:30 PM
Let's shorten this up here.



This exercise should number no more than 10 double-spaced pages, 12p font (Times Roman).

WRITE a story featuring the following characters:

A parent (mother or father, but not both) whose only son, whom they wanted sex with, recently died a violent death. The death cannot be accidental, but still caused by a human act. Think about how it happened while writing(duh).

Include a neighbor of the parent who will always have been in love with the son, since forever. It gets fucked up since they found out the son once raped their (the neighbor's) younger sibling.

Include ONE character from any of the following fictions:
Lessing, "To Room Nineteen"
Palacios, "A Gentleman on the Train"
Alexis, "My Anabasis"
Helen Lee, "Marriage Bones"

Or from any of the prose pieces in At the Bottom of the River (Kincaid), Yellow (Don Lee), or Aureole (Maso).

Make it your own, while still keeping their traits. (psst, make the character one of the characters already in it, like the parent or the son or the neighbor)


Or, even shorter...



Write a story about a son who died that everyone wanted to have sex with. Characters are a parent of the son and a neighbor, and the neighbor's sibling that the son who died had once raped. Make one of those characters be like a character from either these stories ().


Here's some amusing things to think about as well...

The teacher points out it can't be accidental, like a car crash, but that it must be caused by humans, like a land mine. HMMMM.

Everyone seems to want to sex up the son, except the one he went after he ended up raping. HMMMM.

Some possibilities:
The one he raped could play a part in his death.
OR
As the parent and the neighbor both seemed to care for him so much, could be some struggle there as well.

Also, the son doesn't have to be the only one to die.

Personally, I'd take this particular series of rules and bend them so that they still work, but in a humorous way. The point that much of this wouldn't work in a humorous sense would make it all the more humorous.

Of course, that page requirement might make a minimalist sounding, humorous story difficult... but at least with a bit of humor (dark or otherwise) here and there, you'll have a better time writing it, and on occasion want to go beyond the page requirement when you get there, reach the req. much faster, and still have a good sense of intelligence and good writing throughout...

Yeah, the key to creative writing (the class, not the act of creative writing itself, necessarily) is making things humorous, even things like dark humor can work well. Don't make it a serious story (unless your teacher is a hardass about serious stories).


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Mixfortune on 2005-04-20 15:33 ]</font>

Daikarin
Apr 20, 2005, 05:38 PM
http://www.blackartstudios.com/comics/crazyworld1.jpg

_Ted_
Apr 20, 2005, 06:14 PM
The guidelines that the teacher has provided you with make it very easy to craft each character with a trait that makes him or her despicable. I'd suggest making the characters so revolting that the reader has no sympathy for them. In fact, make them so bad that the reader will be left with no feelings for them but pure unmolested hate. That way, the reader will only become more aggravated reading about the characters for ten pages. The body of the work doesn't matter once you've set this up, the only thing you need to do to win the reader's approval is kill every character in one cleansing scene. They can drink poisoned wine, get cut with a poison-tipped blade, stepped on by elephants, aliens can burst out of their chests and so on. As long as they die and die hard it'll all work out.

Mixfortune
Apr 20, 2005, 06:17 PM
On 2005-04-20 16:14, _Ted_ wrote:
The guidelines that the teacher has provided you with make it very easy to craft each character with a trait that makes him or her despicable. I'd suggest making the characters so revolting that the reader has no sympathy for them. In fact, make them so bad that the reader will be left with no feelings for them but pure unmolested hate. That way, the reader will only become more aggravated reading about the characters for ten pages. The body of the work doesn't matter once you've set this up, the only thing you need to do to win the reader's approval is kill every character in one cleansing scene. They can drink poisoned wine, get cut with a poison-tipped blade, stepped on by elephants, aliens can burst out of their chests and so on. As long as they die and die hard it'll all work out.



Classic tragedy.

Outrider
Apr 20, 2005, 06:22 PM
Well, actually, my plan so far is to make the raped child go on a crusade to kill everyone in a Kill Bill-esque story. Of course, it won't really deal with an heirarchy, and I've also decided that everyone will be ninjas. I'm gonna try and go the comedy route, too.

But thank you for the suggestions, everyone.

Just thought I'd note that I asked the teacher if they all had to be humans (since I wanted to do a comedy) and he said they had to. Even if they were like... robots that were completely human-like with full human intelligence. He said it was important that the human element was involved in there, though I really think it's a moot point. Also, the parent can't kill the son. He also said if we want to go over the page limit, we must submit a typed page explaining why we needed to.

He probably threw in some other rules arbitrarily throughout the time we've had to do this, but I can't remember them all.

PhotonDrop
Apr 20, 2005, 06:26 PM
Have the ghost of the son come in and kill everyone instead, then rape the neighbor's child again, then be captured by the Ghostbusters http://pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif

EJ
Apr 20, 2005, 06:28 PM
On 2005-04-20 16:26, PhotonDrop wrote:
Have the ghost of the son come in and kill everyone instead, then rape the neighbor's child again, then be captured by the Ghostbusters http://pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif


O.O

PhotonDrop
Apr 20, 2005, 06:33 PM
On 2005-04-20 16:28, ForceEJ wrote:


On 2005-04-20 16:26, PhotonDrop wrote:
Have the ghost of the son come in and kill everyone instead, then rape the neighbor's child again, then be captured by the Ghostbusters http://pso-world.com/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif


O.O




dude, your sig is awesome, gib D:

Solstis
Apr 20, 2005, 06:48 PM
I'd do him.

EJ
Apr 20, 2005, 06:49 PM
I won't gib but I can make one for you. I just need pics.

_Ted_
Apr 20, 2005, 07:56 PM
On 2005-04-20 16:17, Mixfortune wrote:


On 2005-04-20 16:14, _Ted_ wrote:
The guidelines that the teacher has provided you with make it very easy to craft each character with a trait that makes him or her despicable. I'd suggest making the characters so revolting that the reader has no sympathy for them. In fact, make them so bad that the reader will be left with no feelings for them but pure unmolested hate. That way, the reader will only become more aggravated reading about the characters for ten pages. The body of the work doesn't matter once you've set this up, the only thing you need to do to win the reader's approval is kill every character in one cleansing scene. They can drink poisoned wine, get cut with a poison-tipped blade, stepped on by elephants, aliens can burst out of their chests and so on. As long as they die and die hard it'll all work out.



Classic tragedy.



As long as they get what they deserve.