#AmWriting

Today I cut up a fifteen page story scene by scene... and found out it had about sixty scenes. Today I killed off six characters, including the two-dimensional antagonist with no motives. Today Ipositioned the spotlight over a girl the protagonist doesn't like who wants to be the protagonist's friend. Today I talked to myself so much I could have been reading aloud a book about a crazy person. Today my family went to church while I highlighted passages. Alone, I cursed aloud and used the whole main room floor to spread out pages. Today I threw a ball of paper into the dog's dish by mistake. Today I used up all the paper in the printer. Today I cut a brilliant passage about rock dust that I had no room for, and it stung. A lot. Today I opened a new document to resurrect that kind of dead darling in. Today I used four different kinds of highlighters. Today my mom could not convince me to eat lunch until 3:00. Today, I wrote.

(Actually, I wrote this yesterday. I was too busy writing to post it until today.)

Lit mags count as independent reading!

Recently I found myself in the position of saying,

“I did the assignment but I can't really turn it in because, um, there's stuff written on the back of it.”

That's what you get when you try to combine your English assignments, planner, and writer's notebook.

Thus I have spent some time miscommunicating with the photocopier.

Here's something awesome about English: Lit mags count as independent reading! So my independent reading book is the Peter Ho Davies issue of Ploughshares! Yay!

And... we read The Secret Life of Walter Mitty!

It's by James Thurber. I love Thurber. The story was great, as expected. It is a slice of life (which can be really good!) about a man who does everything wrong and has fantastical daydreams. I think I'm sort of like him. Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa!

At the end of the story, we were asked what we thought Walter Mitty was like. A lot of the class thought he was on drugs, alcoholic, schizophrenic, or had dementia, someone confused him with Breaking Bad's Walter White, one girl thought he was lonely and his wife picked on him. I agree with her. I also think he's writer-ish. I don't know what it says about me that I think a man is writer-ish who most of the class agreed is on drugs.

The teacher (who is not the teacher who went to Emerson, but is pretty cool, proven by the fact that he kept calm when one of the boys drew on his head) also showed us one of those story maps: rising action, climax, falling action. Conflict, resolution. He asked us to fill in the blanks with the events of a story we'd read recently. I went blank. I could think of lots of stories, but some of them were not in any sort of chronological order, in some the conflict was never resolved, some ended with the climax, some seemed to have more than one climax, some had a conflict I couldn't articulate- I could just remember images and characters. I mean, try to graph out one of the stories in 100 Word Story or Beecher's! Eventually I looked around the classroom, saw a poster for The Wizard of Oz (the school is full of theater sets and posters. Also, it has a grandfather clock and three pianos.) and graphed out the Wizard of Oz- the theme is Home. The problem is that Dorothy is stuck in Oz. The solution is that she comes home again. I think I did passably. Phew.

We got a preview- we are going to use a lot of different outlines, including, at some point, a Venn Diagram. Interesting.

I can't believe they made an hour and a half long movie out of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty*, and are making another. Like I can't believe they made an hour and a half long RomCom full of bathroom humor out of Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs. They really did do that! Not that I recommend watching it.

*I've heard the Walter Mitty movie's good, but I haven't watched it.