Subverting expectations with your sentences

• Sentence structure
• Delight and surprise at every turn.
• Noun-verb descriptions get tiring
• Articulate defense of choices
• Compelling narrative, but also compelling way of telling that narrative
• Understand temperaments, learn definitions, implement variety, learn fragments, articulate decisions, acknowledge revision, produce writing
• Gregory Orr’s Four Temperaments:
  • A good poem has two (concrete), a great poem has all four
  • Form: The way the writing is constructed (concrete)
    • Literal forms
  • Narrative: the story (concrete)
    • Speaker/POV
    • Plot
    • Characters
  • Music: the way it sounds (lyric/imagination)
    • Meter/scansion/prosody
    • Alliteration, consonance
    • Rhyme
  • Imagination: the magic that the writer brings (lyric/imagination)
    • Simile/metaphor
    • School (surrealism, minimalism)
    • Magic
  • Today focused on syntax
• Cumulative layering and the appositive:
  • Bridge the gap from abstract to concrete, exteriority to interiority
  • Appositive clarifies the meaning of a sentence
  • Provides essential or additional but not redundant, adds context
  • Good for settings/moods rather than dialogue or action
  • Helps in identifying other nouns
  • “The tree, a jack pine, sloughed the snow from its branches as if it was waking up.”
    • uses language to imbue additional characteristics
    • using simile for personification/interiority
  • “In awe of the jack pine, I didnot believe it until I saw it, the bird’s nest hidden in its needled, benevolent arms.“
    • appositive clause at end
    • clauses are cumulative
    • unexpected adjectives add personification/interiority
  • Above: say writing about religion, using metaphor of benevolence of trees
  • Restrictive and non-restrictive appositives:
    • Restrictives necessary for sentence to function (e.g: including a name with a common noun)
    • Non-restrictive provide additional information, usually a separate clause (still imbues meaning or adds texture)
    • Cumulative layering: adding more non-restrictive appositives
    • Dependent clauses usually appositives, but may not add additional information, unlike appositives
  • A cumulative sentence is known as a loose sentence that starts with independent clause, then adds subordinate elements or modifiers after subject and predicate
  • Useful for putting the main idea first, then expand
  • Example of interiority, gives inner life of the witness (writer as witness)
  • Adds to informality, connection
  • 70% of sentences are cumulative
  • Variety to mix up rhythm of sentence (identify sustained rhythms as places to break)
  • Not really in dialogue, more for mood and scene-setting
  • Restraint: don’t need to layer every noun, just use to propel the plot or the readers
  • Where does the music show?
• Hypotaxis and parataxis
  • Hypotaxs:
    • convey logical, causal, temporal relationships
    • used for argument and persuasion
    • provides inforamation and background about topic
    • subordination of one clause to another, unequal roles in a sentence
    • not defining (at least not literally, but interiority) but expanding/building/exemplify
    • Adds motion (e.g: immediate sentence, then use to further immediacy)
    • Polysyndetons:
      • Figure of speech in which conjunctions are used to join connected clauses in places where they aren’t contextually necessary
      • Creates senses/moods (e.g: conjunctions in list to show abundance)
      • could speed or slow, not always the same mechanism
      • religious sense due to biblical usage
      • can create overwhelming feelings
  • Parataxis:
    • Placing starkly dissimilar images/fragments side by side
    • forces reader to make connections between dissimilar things
    • juxtaposition without subordinating conjunctions (never ‘while’, ‘that’, ‘until’, etc)
    • Can go between sentences/fragments
    • Asyndeton:
      • omission of a conjunction from a series of related clauses
      • accelerate passage and emphasize the significance of the relationship between the clauses
• Fragments:
  • used deliberately for effect
  • not just tossed in
  • emphasize previous sentence
  • building tension through hard stops and pauses
  • important to vary syntax
• Questions:
  • How much is intuitive vs deliberate? — Deliberate mostly in revision, intuitive in writing. In revision, can force it into consciousness
  • Are there styles that work better in certain genres, or are they genre agnostic? — Can span genres, but depends on authorial intent (e.g: minimalism, focus on plot, etc). Be strategic, be careful (e.g: if you have two compound sentences, consider a simple sentence). Use tension to speak about bigger/vaguer/more fluid things. Use tension to avoid didactic writing.

Cyborgs!

• Craft talk on reimagining scifi tropes and why
• Trope:
  • Convention/device that establishes predictable/stereotypical representation of character/setting/scenario in creative work
  • Trope vs cliche: trope more of a signpost of where the reader is; tropes have cliches associated with them
  • Neat way to find your way into a genre
• Cyborgs!
• Robots: mechanical creations
• Androids: human-like robots
• Cyborgs: human-born amalgamations — cybernetics + organism
• Example of flexible scifi trope that can be used in many ways
• a scale of incorporating technology into real bodies. Real now with artificial limbs, artificial joints, maybe even glasses
• flexibility and popularity (visible+misunderstood) good for playing with
• liminal, between human and machine but neither
• both hard and soft scifi
• inherently political
  • technology
  • medicine
  • law, civil rights, privacy
  • bodily autonomy
  • sexism
  • racism
  • ablism
  • sports
  • war
  • intimacy/relationships
• Cyborgish cliches
  • superbeing (soldier, villain)
  • causes (government experiment, horrible accident)
  • heightened senses
  • dystopia (low life + high tech)
  • gender?
• Discussion on Chi:
  • cyborgs as uplifted broken things vs this poem as uplifted low art
  • playing with gender (if cyborg is female, protagonist is male and falls in love)
  • cyborg advocates outside the media
  • translation vs not enough information, poetry resists reader
  • cyborg as metaphor for other where we fail to do the understanding
• Discussion on It’s all fun and games until someone gains consciousness:
  • dividers are close comments
  • Poems would be compiler errors
  • Is this deliberate? Would an AI laugh if it looked at its code and saw this instead?
  • Maybe gaining consciousness is some happy event
• Comparison of other poems:
  • cyborg as reality rather than metaphor in Weise’s work (the poet is the cyborg rather than an ally or outsider)
  • someone on the outside speaking of the cyborg as ‘it’ vs the mind as ‘she’, impersonal, how do authorities view cyborgs? The concept of the ‘less dead’, at what point does it become important?
  • balancing humanity in cyborg while denying it in order to have an ‘other’
  • cyborgs as lived reality, but scifi occasionally warning
• Married
  • From collection Upgraded 2014
  • Cyborg less about hardware, but the experience of replacement/loss
  • Teeth (mouth) as intimate area
  • Narrator keeps talking about ghost, but is there death?
  • Is this about a takeover? Is the end state everyone being sentin? Very personable grey goo scenario
• Writing prompt: Take a genre trope (some are listed on the next slide) and twist it. You could do so in terms of tone: Make a conventionally whimsical trope scary, or add some humor to a sinister figure borrowed from horror fiction. Or you could try to subvert expectations through setting, structure, POV, or another element of craft. You could even take the approach of Franny Choi in “Chi” and create something that talks back to your chosen trope as it exists in another text. Whatever trope you’re reimagining should be evident from the opening lines of your piece, which could take the form of a story or a poem.