Blog Archives - inter-text-ures

Looking for that organizing principle 11/22/2009

This is hard work. Having said that, let's proceed.

Looking for an organizing principle that will tie up all our creative pieces into one collection requires taking a long hard look at what you've written.

That means reading your work as if these pieces were someone else's. It's not an easy job, given that you labored over them all the way from conceptualization to revision. It's kind of difficult to disassociate yourself from the whole process of creating the pieces.

But if you're getting to get anywhere, you need to look at your pieces with a critical eye. You need to find that common element in all the pieces.

One way to do it, of course, is try to look for similarities in themes, in characters, in settings or locales, in images or symbols, etc.

And if you're lucky to have wittingly or unwittingly created stories or poems or plays or essays that have these common elements, then it would be easier for you to look back and try to recapture that moment when you were writing these pieces.

But if your pieces are so dissimilar, then the next best step is to try to recall that time when you were writing your pieces. How did you begin a story or a poem, where did your idea for a play or an essay come from? How did you transform this idea into the creative work you crafted? What problems did you encounter in transmuting this idea into your stories, poems, plays or essays?

Another way, of course, is to find out if you started off with some critical perspective in mind? Did you think of your works as somehow transforming how readers will look, for instance, at women's plights? Did you write your pieces with the idea of how various readers would possibly interpret your works?

Hopefully at the end of this long, hard look at your pieces you will have arrived at an answer (however tentative that may be).

The next step of course is to write what we'll just refer to as the "Rationale" part of your critical preface. As the term implies, this is the raison d'etre for your writing. And this "reason for living" may be found in the answer that reached after that long, hard look at your creative output.

As we said, this is hard work.

Creative Writing Thesis 2 11/01/2009

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'We pin our hopes everywhere everyday' by Jean Claire Dy

Ready for the second and final term for your Creative Writing Thesis class?

If you're in this class (meaning you got me as your Thesis Adviser), that means you enrolled and got a "Satisfactory" rating in your CW 200a class last term.

If you were mainly on your own last term, that was because it was really your ballgame -- writing your creative pieces for the workshop.

This term, however, we'll be working closely in the revision of your creative pieces and in crafting your critical preface.

The critical preface is written around a thematic, structural, or critical organizing principle. You can choose to organize your collection around a theme or subject (for example, initiation stories), a structural question (about a literary element or device, for example: narrative form or use of irony), or a critical perspective (like feminism, postmodern, postcolonial, and so on).

You'll be submitting and presenting a draft of your critical preface and revised creative pieces to the Creative Writing faculty who will sit again as a panel for the Thesis defense.

The panel will be looking for the following discussion in the critical preface and collection of creative pieces:

Your conceptual design, or how the creative pieces were conceived in terms of the unifying organizing principle
Your personal aesthetics, or your reflections on your development as a writer
Your genetic criticism of at least three (3) selected original pieces analyzed in terms of creative process, revision, and effort at craftsmanship

You should be ready to present your completed draft (both the critical preface and revised creative pieces) by the midterm of the 2nd Semester (sometime in January 2010).

You will then be scheduled for an Oral Defense, where you will be given about 15 minutes to give an overview of your thesis, primarily focusing on key points of your preface and collection of creative pieces. After the presentation, you will then prepare for a 30 minute public discussion of your thesis. This will mean fielding comments and/or questions from the panelists and/or audience.

Aside from the Oral Defense, you will also read pieces or excerpts from your collection in a public performance organized by your graduating class, with some assistance from other Creative Writing students.

After successfully defending your thesis, you will accomplish the suggested final revisions. You will prepare a final copy of your revised thesis for approval and grading by the panel. After receiving the signed Approval Sheet from the panel, you are ready to have your thesis bound (six copies in all) for submission and for the faculty to recommend you as candidate for graduation (that is, if you have fulfilled all other requirements).

And you're all set to march during the Graduation Ceremony.

CW 200

Creative Writing (CW) 200 or "Creative Writing Thesis" is a six unit course taken over two semesters. Students enroll three units in the 1st Semester and submit for Workshop their creative writing portfolio. They take another three units in the 2nd Semester and complete the revision of their creative writing portfolio, and submits this along with a critical preface as their Creative Writing Thesis. They defend their Thesis before a panel of critics, as well as produce a public presentation of their selected works.