Category: 1 - 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.

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.