Week 5-1

How do we tell the story of a breakup?

Telling the Story of a Breakup

Meet with your group and review what you made. Make sure that you have something you're ready to share when time is up. If it's a document you need to share with me, email it to me at joshuag@cos.edu.

Sharing

As we listen to each other's stories, here are some questions to think about.

  • What connections to we see between these stories?
  • What differences do we notice?
  • What choices stand out in what the writers did?
  • How would changing those choices change how the piece works?

We had to make decisions about…

  • What genre are we working in?
  • Whose point of view are we writing from?
  • Who makes the first move?
  • How old are they?
  • Where is our focus? On the details? On the feelings?
  • Do we like these people?
  • How does it end?
  • How do they want us to feel?

What genre are we working in? Some other approaches I've seen from students.

  • Epistolary Writing
  • Two-Voice Poems
  • Elegies
  • Dialog (via text)
  • A musical...?

How do they want us to feel? Romeo and Juliet

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene i

Do we like these people? The Last Five Years

Some takeaways

  • There is no right or wrong. There are only choices.
  • The choices we make as writers have certain effects on our readers.
  • That doesn't mean that there's no such thing as "good" or "bad."
  • What counts as "good" or "bad" really depends on whether our choices achieve the effects we intend.

How does this clip feel?