Class Notes

ENGL 284

Table of contents

Week 2 Tuesday

Saving Cat opening - character saves a cat, readers have investment.
Conflict - Crisis - Resolution. Hegelian triad, maybe even false Hegelian triad.
Fifth exit - passing opportunities for resolution. “Trying to subvert the expected.”
How can you take the next exit?
The day’s that different.

Summary, changing time - going between different temporalities
How to dilate and speed time to change perception and narrative structure?
Is summary an event?
Energy - tension and pace. What is the excitement, what is the spark? What propoels the reader forward? It is the result of textures, tensions, story paces.
Energy is the result of craft choices.
Energy changes the temporality of the writing.
Enery is not fixed - it’s a spectrum.
Knowing when to be low energy is as important as being high energy.
Sometimes cold, low energy scenes can generate tremendous tension, perhaps the highest tension, irreducible tension.
Principles of increased Energy: subject choice, sparky word choice, super-specifics, gaps and leaps
How to lower energy?
How to critically fulfill or subvert expectations?
Gap - leaping from one thing to anohter.
Format leaps - interrupts an expectation of consistency.
Dialogue leaps - what are they saying without saying?
Symbolic leap - connections between imagery, action, dialogue
Object leaps - disjunctures which force readers to bridge bizarre objects.
Relationship between the author and the reader: how much work does the reader have to do? How does the author guide the reader?

Insight - fresh, thoughtful, necessary, a unique insight and point of view, which is different and adds.
Insight is the place where the writer, reader, and the story all meet.
How do we learn things as we read? We all gather meaning as we live.
How to understand characters as more deeply related to yourself.
Pushing the borders of tolerance
Complicating the expected is an act of insight.
Three pillars of insight - tension, yearning, subtext - pulse, ache, why?
Subtext - the underlying meaning is left unclear, in the negative space
Ache - we cannot delineate it until it is done.
Don’t preach, overwrite, overexplain.
Trust your reader, and trust yourself.