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Medium

As it gets toward the end of the semester, I always have my students watch some type of film, usually an adaptation of whatever book we’ve read for the semester. This semester we’ve been watching The Talented Mr. Ripley (sigh, Italy), and the final exam will include an essay comparing/contrasting some element from the film with the book. I find this to be a useful assignment to teach students the different ways of telling a story, and how the medium affects the way a story must be told. A book can go to greater depths than a film, but a film has a certain level of pathos that comes with the visual elements. This affects what is included, what is left out, and how it is presented.

This is also a useful assignment because 1) I love to imagine living in post-war Italy, 2) this reduces the amount of prep time I have to devote to lesson planning as finals are looming, and 3) students learn to think beyond plot and look to the more complex elements of storytelling.

Before getting to the more complex elements of your own storytelling, make sure to review the submission guidelines before you press Post. If you’ve found some other yeah write writers you dig, why not ask them to be your writing partner? Everyone needs another set of eyes to point out the typos, content errors, and ungainly phraseologies in our posts.

Prompt up!

Prompt up is our optional weekly writing prompt for the fiction|poetry challenge! Here’s how it works: we choose a sentence prompt from last week’s winning nonfiction post and announce it in the kickoff. It’s your job to use that prompt in your poem or story and then run with it. The prompt is just a springboard, though: feel free to use it as your first sentence, move it, change it, or float down it to other territories.

Lisa told us what mothers really want for Mother’s Day in her post Lesbians and Oreos. And her answer is this week’s prompt up: We want to be left alone.

May poetry slam: the rondeau

We don’t usually do two similar forms back-to-back, but this month we’re building on the bop with another “song” poem, the rondeau. There’s a few more rules to the rondeau, some rhyming and some scanning you’ll have to do, but it’s a lovely and lyrical form that uses skills you already have and then shakes them up in fifteen lines and a refrain. Give it a try! If you’ve been feeling intimidated by the poetry slams, this is a perfect time to get your feet wet and get some feedback with the unmoderated grid.

Check out Sunday’s post which kicked off the week here at yeah write. Our email subscribers can also join us in the yeah write coffeehouse at its home on Facebook.

Yeah write #265 fiction|poetry writing challenge is open for submissions!

Basic yeah write guidelines: 750 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; fiction or poetry only.

How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:

1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the challenge grid badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry
2. Follow the InLinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid
3. Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message
4. Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge
5. Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog

Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.

Thank you for sharing with us your hard work! Good luck in the challenge…[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

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