writing camp 7/11 part 1

again, these are notes taken from my notebook & will be fleshed out when I have a minute...7/11 - not sure what happened to my notes from workshop that morning...so, here's what I have on Aimee Bender's seminar described in the schedule as follows: 2:00 pm WHY DID HE DO THAT AGAIN? The Pitfalls of Character Motivation Seminar with Aimee Bender "After giving birth to a character, a writer needs to take the time to get to know that character and what makes him tick. How does one shape an imagined being into a well-drawn character with thoughts and actions that feel both original and true?"...notes: Mystery & Manners - Flannery O'Connor - 2 + 2 should always be more than 4...theme-1st word to last word...Hiroku Mirakami - 9/11 essay NY Times...the advantage to a closed system - answers are clear...open system - difficult landscape" "How do you work the idea of motivation" "movies w/obvious character's motivations (Crash, etc.)" "you should never know what the character wants"..."different avenues for exploring character motivation - Lydia Davis - trying to capture the feeling of a moment/microcosm; Mirakami - on the other end the action the characters go through" "trust what you don't understand - 'here's an action I cannot explain' Salinger "A. Smith's Blue Period" or Lorrie Moore - shoves pie in her face" (ref. the previous night's reading)..."do not boil down but UP - Essays on Writing - O'Connor"..."The form of a story gives it meaning" "Brautigan, Richard 'The Weather in S.F.'..." "what's being built & what's the follow through?" "hold off judgement to the last instant" the next page is a writing exercise she had us all do wherein we wrote about something we did when we were 9 & could not explain why we did it...I'll spare you all..the person who came up and read her piece wrote about playing the mud naked with a boy - mine wasn't nearly so glamorous...next up, Steve Almond on writing in the lyric register...squeezed in between my notes on Aimee Bender's seminar & Steve Almond's are the following notes (apparently from Swofford's workshop 7/11): Swofford's editing marks (which he wrote on the blackboard if memory serves) I can't do the graphics here since blogger's just not that advanced but...underlined text with a check mark means he likes it, squiggly underline or squiggly underline with "conf." means confusing, brackets [ ] around text means really consider/should it go? a line through words means cut word/phrase from text...seems easy enough to understand but more on that later...the only other note from that day's workshop is, "what was the writer attempting & did he/she succeed?" and that's it...hmmm...