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Okay, here we go.
This is our sanding conference, so called.
And I'm happy to welcome Zenzele Price, she is a sophomore here at Wesleyan.
Zenzele, thanks for doing this.
>> Thanks for having me.
>> Zenzele, you're also a senior fellow here at
the Shapiro Creative Writing Center, so you know this building very well.
In the piece here, this is called the Corner Table, it's the beginning.
Do you want to tell us what stage of composition this whole piece is in?
>> Sure, I just completed the rough draft of the entire piece last night,
so this is sort of like the rough draft of the rough draft.
But, this is maybe the third page in the entire piece,
which is about 15 pages long.
>> I see, so other pages proceed this?
>> Yes.
>> I see, very good.
Okay, well, what you've very graciously
volunteered to do is to just go through this page line by line.
And so you know the students in this class,
they've had their whole drafts at this point critiqued by peers.
But those are sort of macro level of concerns, and now,
we're going to invite people to make very, very small sorts of changes.
And they're the kinds of things that writers do for themselves all the time.
But that I think can sometimes be helpful to see, just what other people have
noticed about their language level decisions, their sentence level decisions.
So students have already read this.
And let's get going, okay?
By the way, everything that I say in here is provisional.
I'm hoping to just bring things up for you to question.
And then of course, you make the decisions.
So we were joking before.
I have the pencil, but you have the pen.
I will make suggestions, but the decisions should be ultimately, your decisions.
Especially in a manuscript like this, which I have to tell you,
has basically no mechanical flaws so far as I can see.
Very often, one of the most important things to be looking for syntax and
grammar, even spelling, those are obviously important things if you want
people to take your work seriously and have an immersive experience.
Okay, so here we go.
I'm just going to read it out loud,
and then I'll stop where I have anything to question.
Can I get you folks anything to drink?
Virginia asked.
A minivan peeled out of the parking lot.
Period, the family period.
I like that fragment there incidentally.
People sometimes wonder, you say a family,
people sometimes when is a fragment useful, when is it important?
It's usually a rhythmic thing.
But the challenge all the time with a fragment is, is it really clear?
To me, it's perfectly clear that this is an observation,
that there's a family inside this minivan, so I think that works pretty well.
The sun had not yet touched the flat Wisconsin horizon line,
but she could feel the breeze shifting.
Okay, so I sort of think of some of the things that I'm going to talk about,
I'll sort of make a list in the margin of things to be concerned about.
So one thing that I would question always is redundancies.
Specifically horizon line.
>> Yeah.
>> What do you think I'm going to say about that?
>> That it is redundant.
>> Why?
>> Because horizon implies a line.
>> Yeah, exactly, and especially,
I think the reason this might of come up in this particular moment is that,
you're underscoring in a good way, you're giving us the setting of Wisconsin,
and this is I guess a prairie kind of landscape.
And that the horizon is especially flat.
It's not as in Connecticut, for example,
where you see the tops of trees everywhere you look toward the horizon.
But since you've already said that it is flat, and it's the horizon,
I think one or another of those words in there should go,
because we know, you've made the point of its flatness.
I would say flat Wisconsin horizon.
Something like that, okay.
The sun had not yet touched the flat horizon line comma, but
she could feel the breeze shifting, that but wobbles for me.
The implication of but is always that there's progression of the previous line,
and then there's a clear turn that contrasts with it.
The sun had not yet touched the flat horizon,
Wisconsin horizon line, means to me that it's coming on sunset.
But she could feel the breeze shifting implies somehow
that breezes shift at sunset inherently.
And that's not quite right.
What do you think, what was that but really about?
>> It's implying that although the sun hasn't gone down yet,
the weather is changing, but those two aren't direct contradictory.
>> Well, they don't need to contradict, they just to contrast a little bit.
So if I were you, I like the idea that there's a turn here,
but but implies a contrasting turn.
You might, for example, a semicolon, instead of the comma but might work there.
Because a semicolon implies a close connection, but
also a contrast suggestion.
However would be too strong, but is too strong.
>> How about though?
I think it has the same problem.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah, semicolon does not contradict the previous thing.
You could also just have a period and
a new sentence, there's nothing wrong with that.
Okay, water, he said.
I often would put the words ant.?,
on a manuscript like this around the word he or she.
Ant is short for antecedent.
And do you remember what the antecedent is?
>> I recall learning about it.
>> The antecedent is, think of ante, the beginning.
It's the thing that comes before a pronoun,
to which the pronoun is referring.
And it's very important thing I think that I find for
a creative piece like this.
You've often imagined things very clearly, and you see things.
You know exactly to what you're pointing, but the reader doesn't necessarily.
And that's why I think when you use a pronoun, such as he, she,
it, they, them, that it be clear what that pronoun is pointing to.
And specifically, almost all the time
that that pronoun points to a noun that comes before it.
That's what antecedent implies.
So I want to propose to you a little pocket rule that I use.
Imagine that the pronoun is referring to the most
recent noun to which it could agree in gender and number.
So I see water, he said, and then I go back in my mind,
rather I go back on the page, and I look for a singular man.
>> Right.
And because I don't find one, I get confused.
I think people often will want to introduce a he or a she or
something like that, then say to the reader implicitly, hold on.
The noun is coming.
And the reader doesn't know that you're saying, hold on.
The reader usually thinks, Zenzele thinks I know what that he refers to.
And I don't so I'm confused.
Do you see what I mean?
>> Yes. >> So I think for
the purposes of the pieces, I understand it so far.
I think it's important for you, you seem to be withholding a little bit
the identity of this character and that's important.
So to me it would be clearer if you in someway identified him otherwise.
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This is a little trick I like to use.
But she had not planned for it,
because no matter how many times she had pictured this encounter at the bus stop,
in the gas station, it, the ticket liner, the ticket in that should be in.
>> Yes. >> Okay, there, we did find one typo in
the ticket line of the theater, she never had anything to say.
I think that the word, because, is something that a fiction writer,
it's really useful to look for that word, look for,
because, look for so, why, because.
When you say, because, you're introducing an argument,
you're giving the reader an explanation.
What you could often do, is replace the word, because, with a period,
and then a capital letter afterward.
And what often happens then,
is that you turn something from an explanation to an action.
>> Mm-hm.
So if I said that, Zenzele went to the store,
because she was hungry.
I'm asking for you to believe me.
If I say, Zenzele went to the store period, she was hungry period,
those are facts of the world.
That is reality, that is, it's dramatization.
So we talk about moving from summary to dramatization,
from summary to scene, that's one way to do it.
Here, I think it's interesting,
I think I like the idea that you're expanding on her motivation.