Today was an extremely productive day: I broke 65,000 words tonight, and am at the cusp of the real action of the climax. I feel far more assured about the ending than I had even a few hours ago, when I gave my last update, though I still need to ascertain some of it. There has been a bit of clarification on certain points, which makes it easier for me to begin imagining how it will work out. As mentioned, I need to balance two concepts with each other, and each one needs to fit with certain parameters. The overall ending will be unresolved, in some ways, and is going to need to be bittersweet as well. That has to develop out of these separate elements, and the individual pieces need to also be able to fit together in the right way. This, in part, has to do with fracturing the narrative, in a way that will create two distinct views on events that then have to come back together into a single narrative again at the end, without resolving the fracture. It...
I've been thinking a lot about the exercises I want to present in my workshop and I have a pretty good idea for most of what I am planning to do, but I would like to add one more example to the syllabus. The general concept is to share different approaches, with focus on different aspects of poetry, and in order to do a more complete job of that, I feel like it would be important to add something that is more about the musicality of poetry. The issue is that I want it to be something that is approachable and not overly technical, but still more than just rhyming or consonance. As well, I am aware that I want to make this reasonable as a group exercise. I trust myself that I will come up with something, as I do often play in that space when I am writing, and I have some techniques and exercises in that direction, it is just figuring out the way to shape it into something with more concrete instructions.
Plot is often seen within certain fairly standard structures. The Freytag pyramid, mentioned yesterday, like the three act structure, and many other standard plot diagrams, builds tension towards the climax, then resolves that tension as the story ends. Vandermeer shows this through a series of diagrams, and then follows with some additional plot diagrams that provide further options. The first of these comes from a film school illustration, and consists of a series of overlapping circles. The progress of the story is similar to that in the traditional plot diagrams, but the focus is upon the way that the circles overlap, a symbol of the transitions that move the story from one phase to the next. The diagram implies that at each step, the new elements begin to mingle with the old, washing them out, before the next phase begins introducing the elements necessary for that transition. After this we get a diagram describing the picaresque novel, a story whe...
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