Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Some Takeaway from Your Writing Success and Failure Stories:

  • Write About what you Care About
(and if you don’t have that freedom, find an angle)
  • Ask for help
  • Write the conflicts, write the struggle 

  • Make Process Your Friend
    • Start the first day; work on a big project for 10-20 minutes a day early in your work window
    • Set FAKE DEADLINES for yourself and treat them like real deadlines
    • Write a ZERO DRAFT

  • Don’t think about your editor or the judgment of your readers until the very end of the process (see “zero draft”)

  • Don’t play games with or try to trick your reader
(from big words that aren’t really yours [yet] or an “official style” to margin and font tricks)

(see “make process your friend”––in other words: if you do the work, you won’t need the tricks)

Prompt for Wedneday, and favorite Sheffield sentences

10-minute free-write in your notebook:

Write about the first song you ever became obsessed with, and talk a bit about your relationship with it then, and your relationship with it now.

OR


Write about an experience where you went somewhere else for a limited but extended time (summer camp, a semester or year at another school or in another country, a brief stint living in another state) and temporarily became another person (or became part of a new and different culture).

And when you're done, share your favorite sentence from the Rob Sheffield reading (followed by your initials in parentheses) here.


Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Some Rob Sheffield-related links

The title track, OMD's "Enola Gay" (As the video's title info clarifies, OMD=Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark)

Haircut 100's "Favourite Shirt (Boy Meets Girl)". Great song, classic goofy 80's video from the very early days of MTV, when only new wave bands seemed to be actually making videos.

New Order's "Temptation" (alluded to on p. 70 of Sheffield's piece, "Up! Down! Turn around! Please don't let me hit the ground")

The Smiths "Ask" (alluded to on p. 72, "Spending warm summer days indoors")

The band Sheffield discovers in Spain, Mecano, and their hit, "Me cole en una fiesta" (The title translates as "I crashed a party").

Later in the piece, Sheffield mentions the Smiths' lead singer Morrissey's song from his long (and ongoing) solo career, "The National Front Disco" (a song that illustrates that 80's music culture was intimately connected with politics in England as well as Spain).

Sheffield refers to Depeche Mode and Soft Cell in passing, so here's Depeche Mode's "People are People" and Soft Cell's one hit, the classic goth-love torch song "Tainted Love" (which, it turns out, is a synthed-out but fairly faithful cover of a 1964 song recorded by Gloria Jones). He refers to the German band Trio's improbable hit "Da Da Da" (which was a minor hit in the US several years after Sheffield hears it in Spain.) He mentions a number of other non-techo-pop/new-wave bands, but to keep this post from getting too much longer, I'll just link one "See-MOAN y Gar-FOON-kel" song.

If you've never seen Airplane!, here's the classic "don't call me Shirley" joke that Sheffield alludes to:





And, with regard to the title of Sheffield's book, and just in case you've forgotten about (or were not aware of) the infectious appeal of Duran Duran, here's "Rio" (Content warning: Simon LeBon in a really small Speedo)

In-class writing for Tuesday

Five minute quick-write:

How do you feel about your name?


If you’re already underway with a topic or direction you feel excited about, write for the rest of the period, developing your ideas and beginning to or continuing to shape an essay.


If you are still having trouble deciding on a direction to take in your essay or a way to focus in on a topic, consider Phillip Lopate’s observation that one important path toward engaging your audience is to understand that your story can “serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.”  Consider a moment, a period, or an experience in your life where you felt “lonely and freakish,” and consider how you might draw on that. What made you feel less that way? Or, if you’re still in the midst of feeling that way, what are your thoughts on why you feel this way and how you might overcome that? And/or, what can you take from that experience, whether it is in your past or in your present?


With that in mind, expand on the “How do you feel about your name?” prompt, revisit the “Have you ever or do you feel ‘split at the root’?”, or begin work some particular path that the contemplation of “lonely and freakish” leads you down.