Drafts ENG 190 – Creative Writing Rosalez Winter 2006
First Drafts: Every Friday you will turn in three pages—typed, double spaced, 12-pt. Font—of NEW writing, stuff I have not seen before, or three new poems of any length. It should be rough—I certainly don’t expect a polished piece every Friday. You’ll get credit just for doing it. The credit will be on a check, check-plus, or check-minus system based on your effort and response to the things we’ve been working on in class. So for example if we’re working on poetry and we’ve done several exercises on sensory imagery, then what you turn in should be some sort of poetry with sensory imagery. Pretty simple, really. But we will talk about effort right away, and please trust me on this: I’ll know when you’ve been trying. So if you’re in class and doing the work and reading the texts assigned, you should be just fine. Keep in mind that these drafts are first drafts. The purpose of this is to get you to do a heck of a lot of generating, which will be especially important in the beginning of the semester.
Individual Pieces: Hopefully this is obvious, but turning in three pages of new stuff every week will mean ending up with well over 40 pages of writing over the course of the semester—and I would never expect you to turn in over 40 pages of polished writing. But I firmly believe in the practice of allowing yourself to write crap—or as Anne Lamott calls them, “shitty first drafts.” Only by allowing yourself to write whatever it is that pops into your head can you fish out the good stuff. So what you turn in every Friday won’t all end up in your portfolio. Some of it may never find its way into a second draft, and that’s fine. Still, save everything. You never know when, five weeks later, you might say, “Oh, man, I remember writing something about that—it sure would be perfect here…”, but if you’ve thrown it away completely, you have to start over.
So after you’ve gotten feedback from those in your group and me, it will be up to you to decide what you want to work on some more. When you decide, start revising and rewriting (which we’ll talk about in class). Feel free at any point to take old poetry and turn it into an essay, use old ideas for new things, etc. Some story might become a poem, and essay could end up a monologue—the point here is that the content will choose the genre, and you will know when the genre a piece is in just isn’t working. So, whenever you think it’s ready to be seen again—in whatever form—bring it in to class with copies for both the group and me, as well as the first drafts we saw with the comments and all. It will be important for you to keep organized with this. Have some folder with pockets or something, and keep ALL drafts on your computer in case you lose something.
As the semester progresses, we’ll be spending more and more time in workshop, and not just on Fridays. Each genre will have different requirements as to how much you should shoot for to put in your portfolio, so I won’t go into that here. The requirement is, however, for each piece to go through at least three revisions, and I have to see them all before they go into your FINAL portfolio (not your midterm—more later on that). Part of your portfolio grade will be based on these drafts having been done, and your grade will be reduced significantly for every missing draft. I don’t know if this sounds like a lot to you. I guess that depends on how much you are used to writing. But I’ll clue you in here: the daunting part isn’t the amount of writing, because you’ll really be doing the bulk of it in class anyway. The tough part here is disciplining yourself. I won’t tell you when to turn in your subsequent drafts, and if you don’t work on them on your own in some sort of regular fashion, there won’t be time for three drafts. Keep this in mind, and keep yourself working. If you put things off, you won’t get all your drafts done and your grade will suffer.
So here’s a draft breakdown: