Class #2 Summary Jan 24

Great job tonight!

You wrote SO well. Please type up your writing and post it to the blog. For those of you who post writing inspired by a photo, post the image or a link to it or the photo credit, so we can pair the story with the image.


Writing Exercises:

1. Write a narrative based on a documentary photograph from a magazine (for those absent, you can do this at home).

We used photos from the VII Photo Agency, Eugene Richards, and the LACMA Photography department.

2. Write about someone you love and make the reader love them too.

3. Write about someone you hate. Have them do something hurtful to the person you love (and just wrote about). Write the story from the perspective of the person you hate, but make the reader love them (or at least feel sympathy for them).

Further reading for your enrichment on writing process:

1. Move It or Lose It — Exploring Rule #2: Write Fast
by Michael L. Wilson
from flashquake Flash Writing
Volume 6, Issue 2
Winter 2006-2007


2. Blogger Anne Elliott writes about her experience in Lynda Barry's writing class:

The focus of the class was what she calls "images," which are detailed slices of memory, the seeds, the resonances, concrete moments in time. We did a lot of list-making, then chose items from lists (or let the items choose us), then written response to her questions to bring the images into clearer focus, then timed freewriting. After the freewriting, we were not to reread our work unless we volunteered to read aloud.

3. from the article "Not at All Cruddy" by Anna McGlynn in the Oberlin Review

Barry spoke about the dangers of falling under the control of your own self-doubt. She pretended to be that “asshole” voice in her head, personifying it as a big dude leaning over her shoulder in a bar who keeps saying, “It sucks. That’s so stoo-pid.”

“I wouldn’t listen to that kind of person in real life, so why do I listen to him when he’s in my head?” Everyone laughed in recognition.

4. Listen to an interview while you do your dishes:

In this hour of Talk of the Nation, join guest host Lynn Neary for a chat with cartoonist and author Lynda Barry about her new "auto-bifictional-ography."