Monthly Archives: June 2011
Chapter 3 – Part 7 – Looking Outside In or Inside Out
I’ve always loved the idea of an inciting incident. What has changed that makes this story important now? Whatever it is, that’s the inciting incident. We looked at how authors chose motifs to demonstrate the main idea of their story, … Continue reading
Posted in Graduate Writing Programs
Tagged analyzing literature, Cervantes, Elizabeth Bishop, Freud and Marx, Homer
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Chapter 3 – Part 6 – Can Writing be Taught?
All three of the structures were based on building tension utilizing the structure of your plot – rising and falling action; character structure – how a character changes; and an ideological structure – choosing the events/situations/details or motifs that best … Continue reading
Chapter 3 – First Class, Part 5
For “Dance of the Happy Shades”, we talked about Munro’s varied sentence structure and how we could write a story as a stream of consciousness. In many of the stories we also talked about how the characters changes were shown. … Continue reading
Chapter 3 – First Class – Part 4
In later classes, we analyzed stories by Tobias Wolff such as “Coming Attractions”, “Desert Breakdown”, “The Rich Brother”, and “Soldiers Joy”. We talked about the structure of the stories in terms of both Freytag’s Pyramid and the narrative cycle theory … Continue reading
Chapter 3 – My First Class – Part 3
When I decided to enroll in the graduate program, I didn’t know if I would be accepted even though I’d already finished an MA in Marketing from the University of Iowa. I did know that if I did get into … Continue reading
Posted in Graduate Writing Programs, Johns Hopkins University, writing
Tagged MFA/MA
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Chapter 3 – My First Class Part 2
Contemporary American Writers was a core course for the people with a fiction or poetry emphasis. The core course for nonfiction writers was similar in purpose, to prepare you to read like a writer, to look for examples of techniques … Continue reading
Posted in Graduate Writing Programs, Johns Hopkins University, Uncategorized
Tagged literature
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Low-Residency MFA
There seem to be a fair number of these. In a recent issue of Poets and Writers (July/August), there are ads for a number of schools including some low-residency programs. Fairleigh Dickinson University which boasts some interesting visitng writers. The Rainier Writing … Continue reading
Chapter 3 – My First Class Part 1
I was looking for the old Hopkins bookstore in the basement of Gilman Hall where my non-credit classes had met. The hallway circles the building and I couldn’t remember which way I should go to find the bookstore. I was … Continue reading
Posted in Graduate Writing Programs, Johns Hopkins University, writing
Tagged first class
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Chapter 2 Taking the Plunge – Part 2
My writing program was a part-time Master of Arts Program and I’ve heard about low residency Master of Fine Arts programs in addition to the full-time programs. I think that I would have liked attending a full-time MFA program so … Continue reading
Chapter 2 – Taking the Plunge
I don’t think anyone really knows if someone is talented before they’ve learned enough of the craft for it to show up in their writing. When I submitted my writing samples for admission into my program, I imagine the Hopkins … Continue reading
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