Everything comes together in the Capstone. You will draft a complete story, narrative essay, or memoir of 8–15 pages. With the advice of your peer readers, you will revise, rewrite, and complete it. The skills you’ve learned of plotting, setting, physical description, characterization, and stylistic clarity and innovation will culminate in an original work of art all your own. We’ll discuss the steps that professional writers take to bring their work into the public world. Along the way you’ll learn the patient habits of revision that make up the writer’s life.
Where We've Been and Where We're Going
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来自 Wesleyan University 的课程
Capstone: Your Story
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从本节课中
Introduction to the Capstone and Gathering Materials
This week we lay out the agenda of the Capstone—seven weeks of structured work in which you’ll proceed from your accumulated notes and exercises to a finished piece: Your Story. We discuss the upcoming sequence of critiques of your fellow students’s work and you assemble the materials for your first draft.
与讲师见面
Salvatore ScibonaFrank B. Weeks Visiting Professor of English
[MUSIC]
You've arrived!
Welcome to the Capstone.
This is an introductory segment where we'll talk about gathering materials.
And also just an introduction to the structure of the Capstone itself.
The Capstone's focus is on your story.
Let's talk a little about where we've been and where we're going.
All of you Who have gotten this far,
have finished all four of the other courses, The Craft of Style,
The Craft of Setting the Description, The Craft of Character, and The Craft of Plot.
The final product of this caption will be your story.
A complete narrative, either in fiction or nonfiction,
as you please, of ten to 15 pages.
If 15 pages seems long, well you'll have seven weeks to do it.
If it seems short, remember the extra effort it takes to keep
things compressed to say only what you mean.
Here's a famous line attributed to a lot of people over the years,
in one version or another.
This version is from Pascal, he said
I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.
We judge that in seven weeks it was possible to put together a piece
of about 15 pages.
Now let's talk about the structure of the Capstone as a course over its seven weeks.
This is going to be different from the other courses in a couple of ways.
First of all, during the other courses, you were practicing a skill.
You were exercising certain elements,
you were making exercises that were quite focused on narrow things.
Instead of a course of study for the capstone project,
we're going to do it in a little bit of a different way.
This is a seven week period of structured work
in which you'll have an occasion to compose and revise.
While you do all of those, we'll provide milestones to keep you on track, and
from time to time give you a little bit of advice, which you're,
of course, free to take or leave.
And most importantly, as you go through this,
you'll get extensive feedback from your peers.
The Capstone is spread out over seven weeks,
with periodic milestones to keep you on track.
The focus of all of this is the creation of your story
by the end of those seven weeks.
So we're not going to have any exercises in the meantime.
We're going to keep things focused on that one large project.
But we will ask you to do, in the meantime, a series of critiques.
First of all there will be critiques of whole drafts of your fellow
students' work.
That's a sort of macro critique.
Next you have two critiques of just the first pages of summary of
fellow writers' work.
In that occasion you'll be able to focus on very small word level,
sentence level criticisms places where you think the languages are really working and
places where you'll report that you think the language needs a very slight shift,
maybe just at the level of one word or a change in a comma.
You'll have an occasion to be as fussy as you want to be just on that one page.
Finally, at the end, after you've submitted into final version of your
story, you'll be critiqued again on the full version and
the evaluation that you'll receive from your fellow writers.
Lets summarize how these seven weeks are going to be structured.
In week 1 we'll talk about where we've been and where we're going.
I'll lay out the structure of the class.
We'll the discuss the end product and we'll start to gather the materials for
the first draft.
The milestone for that week will be this pile of materials, the thoughts,
the scraps of prose.
And most importantly the exercises and
excerpts that you've already written in the other courses that you've
been thinking maybe you will want to use in the construction of this final piece.
Those things will be the seeds of the story on the page.
In week 2, we'll talk about composition strategies through conversations with
Amy Bloom and national book award winning novelist Jaimy Gordon.
We'll discuss a variety of strategies for
gathering those materials into a coherent home.
For the first two weeks of the class, you're going to be working on trying to
gather those materials into a complete piece.
The milestone here would be, will take two weeks finally.
It would be a complete draft of your first story available for
the review of your peers.
In that third week we'll talk about finishing the first draft.
In that week, all of your efforts will be focused on bringing the thing across
the finish line in a form that's able to be reviewed by your fellow writers.
It will be due at the end of the third week.
So if you're starting to work now, get going.
You've got three weeks to get this first draft in order.
Meantime, we'll get some advice from a variety of writers In that third week,
most of them former Wesleyan students who have gone on to careers as writers and
have been at this stage before.
In the fourth week, we'll talk about peer review.
We'll discuss the best way to give critiques,
including an the example of a work shop.
The milestone for this week will be to provide those three important
detailed critiques of the macro level,
the large decisions that the writer's made in his first draft.
Week five, we'll talk about how to sift the critiques you've received, learn how
to best use them, how to take difficult advice, and when to put it aside.
We'll also get a demonstration of fine grain editorial work.
Line by line editing, this is what we'll call the sanding critique.
And once you've seen a demonstration of it you'll begin the work of revision
while you also do some fine grain editing of your own.
Word by word critique of the first page or two of several of your peers' stories.
In week 6 we'll talk about rewriting and publishing.
While your at work rewriting and making the final draft of your story, we'll have
a discussion with Professor Skyhorse who's a former senior editor at Grove Atlantic.
About publishing and what editors of magazines and
books look for in a manuscript.
The milestone that you'll be pointing to here will, again, be two weeks,
pointing to the end of the seventh week, so all hands will be on deck for
you to put together the final version of your story.
Finally, week 7, the final version of your story and where to go from here.
As you get ready to meet your deadline, and turn in the final version of your
story for peer evaluation, we'll discuss practices for continuing the creative
momentum that you've built up over the course of the specialization.
Among the options that you might entertain include writer's conferences,
or writer's workshops, and we'll talk with a couple of professionals in those fields.
The milestone for that week is the whole enchilada, your final piece.
Once you turn in the final evaluations of three of your peers work,
you'll be certified as having completed the specialization, and
you'll be able to see what they've said about your work in the end.
[MUSIC]
