Steering The Craft
Chapter 10
Crowding and Leaping
The "leaping" section so reminded me of the discussion about the Buffy episode and even my impressions of "Willi," and the "crowding" section brought to mind the very first few discussions we had in class about poetry: being specific rather than using abstract words. I felt particularly challenged by the exercise to cut in half a short story I've written. I think I worked backwards from what Le Guin recommended in one of my stories, writing two very abstract scenes, then trying to fill in the gaps (small surprise that worked so poorly), and now I'm trying to re-write it entirely since the third draft was so impossibly jumbled. It's hard for me, though, because most stories come to me in random scenes that later grow into a complete story, so I find myself trying to add more often than I find myself trying to strip down. I'll have to work on that. I might try her exercise with the first short story I submitted for class, and possibly for the ghouls poem/story. I've been trying to expand the ghouls poem into a story so that it has some context, but maybe it needs to be stripped down. It will be interesting to see which direction is clearer.
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