by Isabella Oliveria & Patrick McKee

This week Alexia introduced us to Yossi Klein, chief editor of Bread Wine and Thou. As a class, we worked through two pieces of criticism about French restaurants and food, and discussed the differences and the impact of both.

 As a class, we read through a review written by Jay Rayner and a review by A.A Gill, both about French restaurant experiences and both negative reviews. We looked at and outlined the key differences and similarities of the reviews and focused on the types of description and voice in both. We had not yet tackled the idea of the negative review so looking through these two articles – that differ so much in language and description –  gave us two different examples of negative criticism. Both articles had distinct voices, but were for two very different publications (The Guardian and Vanity Fair respectively) so the “humour” can be classified as “high brow” and “low brow”. This relates back to our Q&A session with Simran and Phillpa last week ensuring that you pick the right publication for your voice.

We also were able to have a Q&A session with Yossi about his writing career and projects. Hearing Yossi’s stories and attitude towards writing was quite inspiring as it gave us another perspective on critical writing and writing in general. Yossi’s key argument was that “everyone has a story to tell”. I think I really related to the ideas of telling stories about the particular thing you are writing about (in this case, we were discussing wine) rather than boring your audiences with details about your subject.

Some of the advice that Yossi gave us:

• *Writing finds you
• *Everyone has the ability to tell stories
• *Don’t be egotistical, be honest
• *Be self critical: you’ll know when it becomes counter- productive.
• *Everything is derivative, we are influenced and receptive to everything

Embarking on a significantly different task from Monday’s tutorial, however, was in Wednesday’s lesson where our class was set with the challenge of completing our very first descriptive task. The process involved creating what Alexia termed as “explosive sentences”; essentially, the aim of the task was to transform an initially bland paragraph – one that was devoid of any compelling details or emotion-inducing phrases – and to ultimately add some of our own personal flare to it, making the paragraph “explode” with imagery and description.

The choice was ours to make in terms of what sentence of the paragraph we wanted to embellish and, in spite of the task’s seemingly easy exterior, many of us found it quite tricky to revamp an entire sentence that didn’t necessarily have a whole lot of meat to work with. On the other hand, there was a select few of us that found that the sparseness of detail actually helped to ignite a multitude of narrative possibilities, ushering us into an hour long writing session which tested our creative flare and ability to construct a story.

After the allocated time had passed, it was time to share our newly refurbished sentences, starting from the first sentence and working our way to the last. Indeed, it was here that we found just how disparate many of our stories were in the sense that the same sentences, edited by different students, could end up following completely different trajectories. Protagonists ranged from melancholy to utterly depressed and the setting either frantic and panic-stricken to desolate and solemn the next.

This tutorial was certainly filled with many “why didn’t I think of that?” moments and other creative revelations that not only helped us explore the extent of our descriptive writing capabilities, but to go beyond those boundaries as well.