Year Two has kicked off nice and smooth like a popcorn kernel in my gums... but I survived the first day. The bombarding of 15 page syllabi and grueling discussions of attendance and participation. I also survived my first screening and i.did.not.fall.asleep. Which I seem to be infamous for.
I haven't met many first years, but they seem as lost and scared as I was last year so I will forgive them for taking my comfortably huge Main theatre.
This semester's schedule:
Tues/Thurs morning- Creative Non-Fiction: Writing the Personal Essay
I'm taking this class with a very small group and my Academic Advisor, Joe. The first day was very satisfying. We wrote. We talked about writing. What I learned? Ideas are like birds... they'll fly away... if you don't write them down.
After writing for a little exercise I learned, it's possible to find new things in old places..
Essay comes from he french word essayer which means "to try." I found that really beautiful. Joe asked a very important question: Why do you want to write?
The following are a few quotes I came across while studying:
"Writing is indeed a solo act, but the result is meant to be shared" Dinty W. Moore
"I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts..I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words..I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love."
Terry Tempest Williams
I found a great point in my creative writing assignment that put into words what I could never. Writing is fun. Although I would love to know every word in the dictionary, I don't. The closest I got to it was when I was studying for a year to take the GRE and submerged myself in beautiful words in the vocabulary section of a study guide. Since then I've started reading more. I come across a word I don't know, I look it up. Then I make a mental note to try and use it in a sentence when it's relevant. But then there are those 'novice' writers who think that good writing is nothing but multisyllabic words. Anyone can pick up a thesaurus and write a wordy sentence. But you'll use your reader, trust me. The game of 'look up the word I don't know' is fun the first three times or so. My text book said it perfectly:
"Novice writers often trip themselves up trying to sound weighty or cerebral, but the truth is that expressing yourself in simpler words requires more craftsmanship and skill than using multisyllabic, flowery language, and it almost always works better."
"The best writers never settle for the insight they find on the surface of whatever subject they are exploring. They are constantly trying to lift the surface layer, to see what interesting ideas or questions might lie beneath."D. W. Moore
I also found some great advice from the author: "Step outside of our own thoughts, to imagine an audience made up of real people on the other side of the page. This audience does not know us, they are not by default eager to read what we have written, and though thoughtful literate readers are by and large good people with large hearts, they have no intrinsic stake in whatever problems (or joys) we have in our lives.
Next on Tuesdays I have Directing with Mr. Janos Kovacsi. This first class was so full of great information and knowledge. It was hard to keep up. 4 1/2 pages of notes later...
We screened clips from: The Cotton Club (1984) Directed by Coppola; Raging Bull (1980) Directed by Scorsese; and Vertigo (1958) Directed by Hitchcock. Mainly we discussed shooting ratio which is a pretty interesting concept.
I also learned about a new camera angle: The Choker. lol
Tuesdays end with The Fundamentals of Visual Storytelling with Ron Roose. This is going to be a fun class. Our first class we screened The Conformist (1970) Directed by Bertolucci.
Thursdays are Creative writing, Producing and World Cinema. Then nothing!
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