Going Places
I would like you to write an blog/essay about a place. Once again, you will publish it in Medium.
Your piece is to be a multimedia piece, taking full advantage of the capabilities of the website, linking words to other sites, incorporating images and/or video, pulling sentences from your text for emphasis as teaser quotations.
The place could be any place — a city, a room, or a secret wood. Write about a particular “outdoor” place, whether it’s a large place, like a farmer’s market or like the Sleeping Bear Dunes, or a small place, like a rock in the middle of a river or a pond you might know well.
Or a really small place like the interior of a mitochondrion (the guts of a smart watch?)
Or write about an urban place — a city, a restaurant, a neighborhood, an alley,
a building, or a room. Write about what it was like to be a child in your home or to be a teenager in an uncomfortable place. You can be a participant.
You may use first person, second person, or third person.
You could even take us into a fictional place, like the High Isles in The Elder Scrolls or Hamlet’s castle (different stage representations of?), Dante’s Hell, or Max’s bedroom.
Your purpose is not merely to describe a place for the sake of description! You’ll be writing about the place to say something about it or about the people that go there or that don’t go there. As your story evolves, you may find yourself emphasizing something that happens in the place more than the place itself. That’s fine. Give yourself free rein to follow.
You want to provoke your readers to think, to muse upon the place you write about, and to think about the significance of what you say for their own lives. As you consider the purpose of your piece, think about the following possibilities:
It will help if you have a very specific audience in mind — imagine yourself writing a letter to specific people that you know or to imagine yourself writing to the readers of a particular magazine. Think about what would you could tag in the blog, about what might make people want to share this. There will be a prize for the person who gets the most “likes.”
In whatever you write, you should strive for the unusual, whether in subject or in angle. Remember that readers like to read about places, but that what they like is something fresh, something that reveals the place in a way that they hadn’t before seen it or something that shows them something useful about the place. You will be publishing this in a public forum, but imagine, if you wish, a specialized subset of that readership — a group of people that would find your article via tags the way that they might have picked up an old-school magazine that matched their interests. Use concrete language and try for vivid descriptions; try to show the reader your place instead of merely telling about it.
Look around at magazines to get ideas. Just about every magazine has articles on places, and there are as many approaches to an assignment like this as there are places. And if the topic shifts while you’re writing, don’t worry about it (even if the place becomes secondary to some other focus).
How long? Let’s say 714–897 words, but, then, as folks say, a picture counts for a thousand words, so hmm, in that case you might be presenting 10, 000 words. Ask me if you have questions.
Deadlines?
Nov. 18 F Getting Started
Nov. 21 M Due: Chunk of prose (225 words +; experiment with angle & voice); bring computer). No class meeting. Submit in Moodle
Nov. 28 M Due: Bigger chunk of prose with a bit of draft in Medium. Share draft URL in Forum.
Nov. 30 W Workshop; due: shared draft (put URL in Moodle forum by 9:30 a.m.); bring computer and bring a printed copy
Dec. 2 F Project due; presentation & evaluation; bring computer
