The folklore Love Triangle7/4/2021 Part I: august
“The sun drenched month of August, sipped away like a bottle of wine. A seventeen-year-old standing on a porch, learning to apologize. Lovestruck kids wandering up and down the evergreen High Line. A cardigan that still bears the scent of loss twenty years later.” It started with an Instagram countdown on July 23rd, 2020; 24 hours later, the 8th studio album folklore has redefined Taylor Swift’s place in the music industry. Along with the release of her would-be third Grammy album of the year, Taylor Swift has told the public — "I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I've never met." In folklore, three tracks — cardigan, august, and betty — are told from the perspective of three kids and a summer that changed everything, for worse or for better.
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Editing Poetry, Part II: the Days Onward6/30/2021 As long as you’re alive, there really isn’t a point where you can say that you’re done with writing a piece. Even several years down the line, when you stumble upon something you’ve kept untouched for a long while, it’s impossible to fight back the urge to alter some parts of the piece.
But there’s a problem: you no longer feel the same way. In every piece of writing, there’s a speaker we’ve come to know as “the narrator”. As you are currently reading these words, there’s a voice guiding you along the page, saying these words to you. The role of the narrator is to move the story along and provide a voice for the sentences of a story or poem.
The narrator takes on many roles, but one thing that stays consistent is their point of view. Regardless of what you read, you are reading from a perspective provided by the author and funneled through the narrator. Different points of view can accomplish different things in writing, such as distancing the audience from the action or fully immersing them in the story. Let’s take a look at the points of view: This is a continuation from last week’s article, because in literature, everything is connected.
Finding inspiration in writing poetry is like pouring alcohol — precise, thrilling, foreshadowing — while developing the piece is bold like taking the shots you just poured in one breath, and editing the finished poem — the words intoxicated and the stanzas ecstatic — is the morning after. You wake up, hungover, the taste of alcohol and poetry lingering in the air and in the back of your throat. There is a beautiful mess from last night. Suppose it’s like picking torn-up confetti and broken bottles off the ground, but the jagged edges turn into knives, or like closing the tab for a horror film you couldn’t have gotten out of bed to turn off, but flashbacks still haunt you with the sun over the horizon. It hurts to read your own drunken thoughts — because you know they’re true, because you know that if you wanted to say something drunk then you wanted to do it when you were sober. It hurts to know that you’re hurting. Enhance Your Writing with Word Painting6/18/2021 When you think of “word painting” you might think of imagery, but this term actually originates in music theory. Simply described, it is when the music of a song mimics its lyrics. Here’s a helpful Wikipedia article about the history of word painting if you’d like to learn more.
But why am I talking about this on a writing blog? Good question. The art forms of music and writing share this technique of word painting. In writing it’s when the sound or rhythm of words reflects the action being described. But let’s back up to where word painting began. A famous example in music is the note progression in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz. The notes between “some” and “where” go way up high like the lyrics say. You can hear the lyric here. Poetry and activism have long intertwined. This article explores that history and analyzes the techniques of activist poetry.
We’ll start with more recent history. If you’ve been on social media, you’ve seen the surge of activist content around BLM, Pride Month, and other important social issues like climate change and voting. The drive of activism is not only to enact change in unjust systems, but firstly to expose people to injustices they are unaware of. Poetry is an accessible art form, and has been detailing injustice for centuries. Poetry does three things well: Reaches an audience, Expresses emotion, and Draws attention to existing inequalities. William Shakespeare’s works continue to leave an impact on the literary world after four centuries. Looking at Hollywood alone, you’ll see his plays being retold in film after film — “The Lion King” was inspired by Hamlet, and “10 Things I Hate About You” retells The Taming of the Shrew. When discussing poetry, it would be criminal to not mention Shakespeare’s influence, especially when it comes to the sonnet.
Inspiration in Writing6/6/2021 It’s 2am and you’re sitting on your bed, pillow against your back, laptop dimmed and a blank document lies in front of you. Your family is asleep and your life at school floats to the back of your mind. There is a soft aching in your chest, where your heart should be but you no longer feel its presence. You look out the window and it’s pitch dark, with only the grids of office windows alight. They form a pattern in the night, so distortedly assembled yet silently rhythmic. The hurting travels from your heart up to your mind. You are tired of being human.
Maybe that’ll be the first line: i am tired of being human. Settings are like ocean currents — rough, raw, unhinged — and characters are droplets of water — intricate, refined, polished. Fundamentally speaking, they come from the same thing: the world of fantasy in your mind; however, to put them down on paper, there are no universal formulas. This week, we don’t dive into waters, but instead, we fetch from the ocean and take what we find upon land, where we can study them under the glistering sunlight.
How often do you wash your hands in a day? According to a study conducted in 2008, the average American washed their hands about 8 times a day.
Now, how often do you take the time to feel the soap against your hands as you wash them? Categories
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