Choose one of the following prompts to write a 500 words response? 1. In How To Be An Other Woman and How, the characters get stuck in two different kinds of relationships, then disentangle themselves. What does Moore accomplish by using the second person point of view (the “you” pronoun)? Things to think about: second person point of view is relatively uncommon in fiction. How does it contribute with the telling of these stories (or interfere with the telling)? Who is telling the story, and who is the audience? (Creative writing option: Write a page or two of fiction in the second-person.) 2. “Some of your images are quite nice, but you have no sense of plot,” a writing teacher says in How To Become A Writer. Discuss this juxtaposition. Professor says: Your writing should be true and beautiful and good. That is all. I want your writing to be true, which means it shows that you are reading your primary text closely, perceptively, attuned to subtexts between the lines and contexts beyond the lines, and that you are not lying to yourself about what is actually in the text because you’d like the text to be something that is easy or familiar or comfortable. If you write the truth with enough subtlety, passion, and judicious use of your own verbal palette, your writing will not only be true, but beautiful. You’ve been told that the truth is ugly. No. Truth is beautiful. Even ugly truth can be beautiful. If your writing is both true and beautiful, it means that you are being honest, responsible and generous to yourself and your reader; it means that your writing constitutes a moral good, that you have honored the ethical promise implied––just like the one implied by a face that looks up in greeting––by any words on a page, even before we read them. (But, like, whatevs, tl;dr, no pressure…) I attached the reading and the rubric for a short response.
