Cause Narratives
What to do
Here are the three possible narratives you are to begin writing about, all of which are derived from a commonplace understanding of the emergence of our strengths from some event of failure ("something wrong"):
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In each instance, the structure you are using to locate the "cause" of the strength/quality is:
Keep in mind that is may take writing more than one narrative for each strength and time period until you find the “best” one, which your workshop group will help you to judge.
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I have adapted and repurposed parts of this assignment from a "distinction" designed by Werner Erhard called "The Winning Formula" (circa 1989) the basis of which you can explore in an early article (1975) written by Erhard, Guerin and Shaw (recommended readings). |
RationaleIn this course we are attempting to inquire authentically into what it means to be a writer. Authentic inquiry is an inquiry in which you strive to make your own unique inquiry. This means you do not stop at finding the most common and ready answers: you must be willing to tolerate not knowing a right answer and to instead play with possibilities, to experiment, to take risks, to drop what doesn’t work and move on to what might.
One set of possibilities we are “playing with” in this course is that to be a writer means to write in two modes: exposition and scene. Furthermore, there are two correlative qualities of being a writer that go with these practices: integrity and receptivity (these terms come from Scott Consigny's article "Rhetoric and Its Situations"). That is, integrity to our projections and receptivity to scene. Within any given act of writing we are doing both, but we usually perform them at conservative levels. Until we are challenged, we don’t need to exercise these qualities very much and so we rarely develop them beyond inauthentic levels—levels that everybody already does and already expects you to perform. Concisely put: integrity to projection reveals the world to us, while receptivity to scene allows us to notice the surprising, which in turn challenges our integrity, and hence, our identity. Receptivity to SceneWe sought to distinguish the argument of Mamet’s essay: his problem and what method he asserts will correct the problem. Mamet made it quite clear that for a scene to work (to drive the audience to want to know what will happen next), it must trigger exigence: an experience of urgency to fix a problem. When writing in scene, and revealing “what happened,” you allow uncertainty to dominate, such that the audience WANTS to know how it will get resolved: they become driven to find out which purpose will win over the other and how.
There’s an irresistible demand to resolve any uncertainty. We have been calling this the context of a controlling value. The demand for resolution controls, or at least strives to determine how to resolve the uncertainty present in the situation through enacting the “purpose.” Now your job is to bring this deepened distinction about scene into workshopping the narratives you will be writing for the rest of the semester. I recommend re-reading Mamet more than once. You will continue to learn from him each time. There’s gold in them thar words. Integrity to ProjectionAt the same time, we are also, inevitably, moving in the opposite direction: integrity. We cannot help but project. What we can do is experiment with projecting intentionally, which is what we are doing trying to articulate strengths and then use them as lenses to invent recent scenes, and even successes that your strengths have brought you, but also the possible “causes” of your strengths.
Consequently, focusing on integrity, I’m asking you to employ a “projection,” using it as a tool, an instrument, a lens, to look into the past to “find” the causes of your strengths. Essentially, I offered that strengths emerge from encountering exceptional moments of exigence that resulted in failure. The strength emerged as an interpretation the character narrator formed during and after the event, which then determined or controlled future approaches to similar situations. (Discussion of Culler) |