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Writing Exercises
Writing exercises for the workshop will be posted here. If you are so inspired, work on the exercise at home and bring it to class.
Exercise for January 14, 2003
The Innocent Eye
Write about an important, memorable or defining event (either a major
world event, like 9/11, or something epochal in a personal way, like a
death in the family) from the point of view of a child. Your protagonist
can be any age from toddler to teenager, but you must stay in the child's
consciousness. You may write in the first person or third. You don't need
to use childish language, but you should not include information or perceptions
that the child character would not have access to. For inspiration, check
out some of the books mentioned in my article on The
Child Protagonist in Fiction. -- Kathryn Kulpa
Exercise for January 7, 2003
Nose, Meet Grindstone.
Yes, it's time to get back to work on whatever great literary endeavor you are forestalling. Mine is the final chapter to my novel. Yours may be the revision of a novel, the revision of a story, or the first draft of a story. Whatever it is, it's time to summon the courage and start pounding it out. You know you love it when it starts to come, so just let it come.
Do three pages of revising or three pages of writing. Just start working on whatever you're working on. Bring it to class and share it, if you can. If you're not working on anything, here are some prompts:
Invent a character who is in every way the opposite of you.
Write about a career you once dreamed of having as a child.
Write about someone who is a bad speller.
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Exercise for November 19, 2002
TYPECASTING
"You know more than you think you do."
--Jincy Willett
This is a character development exercise, adapted from What If? : Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Pamela Painter and Anne Bernays. You should work with a character you have already invented or are in the process or inventing, someone you already find interesting enough to write about but would like to know better.
Start with the phrase, "He/She was the sort of person who …."
Write this down five times, then complete the sentences with five insights about your character. Feel free to use slight variations in phrasing, or to carry the observation beyond one sentence. The idea is to capture something essential about this person in one pithy observation. (Note: this can also work in the first person; see the Michael Cunningham example.)
You may not end up using these exact sentences in your story or novel, but you just may like one of them enough to keep it! In any case, you will learn things about your character that you didn't know you knew.
Sample sentences:
She was, obviously, one of those women whose polished words may reflect
a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never
her soul.
--Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
He was born sleepless, without a talent for rest or the desire for it.
--The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald
He was the sort of man who, dispatched to the grocery store to buy eggs
needed for a cake-in-progress, might come home with any number of interesting
purchases, from goat's milk to daffodils, but certainly not with eggs.
--"Mr. Lillicrop's Shining Moment," Kathryn Kulpa
Who else but Fanny keeps Oreos and Lorna Doones and Hershey's Kisses
out in the open for anyone to see?
--"Crazy, Crazy, Now Showing Everywhere," Ellen Gilchrist
He slouched, and wore clothes badly: he always looked as though he had
just been jumped for his lunch money.
--The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
Carlton and I played in the cemetery as children and, with a little more
age, smoked joints and drank Southern Comfort there. I was, thanks to
Carlton, the most criminally advanced nine-year-old in my fourth-grade
class.
--"White Angel," Michael Cunningham
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Exercise for October 29, 2002
A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY
Have you ever run across an old photograph and been fascinated by the faces of people captured in a moment now long gone, wondering who they were, what they thought about, what their lives were like?
This exercise uses old pictures as a way to open the imagination and give us some practice in ways to develop--no pun intended!--rich, complex fictional characters.
Begin with a photograph, preferably of someone you don't know, or don't know well: a face in an old family photo, someone-or-other's friend in a group shot, or a picture of unknown origins found in an antique store. (Note: I found some really cool old photos in a little shop on Wickenden Street. If you were not in class on October 22, you'll need to scout out your own picture for this exercise.)
Then, create a list of FIVE SIGNIFICANT LIFE EVENTS for this person. These should be memories that are significant to the character; they need not be huge or dramatic. Write a sentence or a few lines about each event. Also, give your character a name.
Next, after you have a sense of your person's life, do a 15-minute writing
exercise in which you take on the fictional persona and write a first-person
monologue in your character's voice. The monologue can refer to one of
the life events from your list or it can be about the moment when the
photo was taken. Feel free to 'speak' in a voice very different from your
own, and have fun!
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Exercise for October 22, 2002
Music as Muse
This is from a book called Altered States: Creativity Under the Influence by James Hughes:
"Psychic movement and displacement often announce themselves in the form of vibration. The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam experienced a kind of inner rhythm before a poem came to him. Others, such as Nabokov, call it a "throb." Sound underlies both image and speech. Sound and rhythm, music and dance, are basic means of altering consciousness. The beats of the pulse and the heart, the inhaling and exhaling of the breath, are all the work of rhythm. Life is governed by the rhythmic working of the whole mechanism of the body. Sufi mystics believe that among all the arts, the art of music is especially close to the divine because it is a miniature of the law working through the whole universe. The organization of sound becomes music, which is also a language, a form of communication. Its basis is the call and response, forming a connection between speaker and audience." (p. 157)
The idea of this exercise is to take a musical piece of any kind (classical, jazz, new age, folk, rock) and use it as inspiration for 15 minutes of writing. You can try writing as you listen to the music, or you can listen to the music first and then write, or you can just imagine listening to the music, if this works for you. There are no restrictions around topic or type of writing. If you are working on a longer piece, like a short story or novel, try using this exercise to create a new piece of your current work.
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Writing Exercises from Spring 2002 class
Exercise for April 30, 2002
MINIMALISM TO THE MAX
I got this exercise from my friend Tracy Boothman Duyck, who encountered it in a fiction class with Tom Cobb. It’s deceptively simple, yet challenging. Your task is: write a short-short story (or vignette, or prose poem) with exactly 10 sentences, and ONLY ten sentences. The first sentence must contain exactly 10 words, the next 9, and so on, until the final sentence of just one word.
I’ve found it helpful to number 10 lines in my notebook, then fill them in-not necessarily in order. The discipline of being allowed a limited number of lines and words, like haiku, heightens our awareness of language and is a great lesson in economy. In one case, I found that what I wrote for this exercise became the basis for a longer piece. It can also lend itself to nonsense -- not always a bad thing!
Here’s an example of the “countdown” story.
Woody’s War
10 I cannot kill the black cat in the back yard.
9 He stalks, and struts, and flaunts his fat tail.
8 I’ve seen his brazen paw-marks on the car.
7 I know he fouls each growing bush.
6 I dream red dreams of vengeance.
5 Tail high, taunting, he passes.
4 I’m helpless, he knows.
3 My fury’s pent.
2 The screen--!
1 Meow.
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Exercise for April 23, 2002
Please read the following excerpt from Natural Gardening A-Z, by Donald W. Trotter, Ph.D, and write a three-page story that includes some aspect of the information.
Deer Protection
Deer are beautiful and majestic creatures that can sometimes destroy entire gardens in one night. Deer love to come into a lush garden and feast on prized plants when their natural food supply is limited or dried up. Deer develop feeding patterns, and if they have visited your garden once and enjoyed your plants, chances are they'll be back soon. Deer can become a very destructive animal pest.
Controlling Deer invasions: Fencing is the one sure-fire way to control deer visits, but if you are not interested in putting up a Berlin wall around the garden, several other ways to control deer are very effective. Garlic sprays have been successful in some cases, but the urine of predatory animals (us included) is one of the most natural and effective means to control deer. Just mark your territory as any animal would. This method is especially effective after eating venison.
I'm going to try to have fun with this one. Hope you do too! KM
Exercise for April 16, 2002 (introduced on April 9 by Kathryn)
The Newspaper Muse
"It is the very skeletal nature of the newspaper, I think, that
attracts me to it, the need it inspires in me to give flesh to such neatly
and thinly-told tales, to resurrect the event which has already become
history and will never be understood unless it is re-lived, re-dramatized."
--Joyce Carol Oates
Object: To find a short newspaper article (magazine article, obituary, advice column letter, etc.) that triggers your imagination and to understand how, when you dramatize the events, the story then becomes YOUR story.
The Exercise: Clip out one (or more) short items from a daily paper, a tabloid, a magazine or other media source. Bring your clippings to class next week. We'll do a short writing exercise taking off from the bare bones of the story you found.
You might also want to try some warm-up exercises at home. For example,
let's say you found an item in a small-town police log about a woman who
reported that her neighbor's children maliciously threw a volleyball into
her garden, injuring her tomato crop. Whose story would interest you most?
The woman? The kids? The policeman who had to investigate the crime? Create
a short profile of the person whose story you'd like to tell. Or sketch
a quick outline of the background events leading up to the action.
Exercise for April 2, 2002
This one is from What If? : Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Pamela Painter and Anne Bernays.
Write a Story Using a Small Unit of Time.
Make a list of things that are done in small units of time. For example:
Naming a pet or a child (not for most parents I know--or most pet owners
for that matter!), breaking up with someone (Editor's Note: HA!), playing
a game like Risk or Monopoly, washing a car, stealing something, waiting
in line for something, packing to go somewhere, changing the message on
an answering machine, cleaning the refrigerator (that would take days
for me!), having a birthday party,
etc.
Write a short story that takes place within the limits of the time period for your activity. Use the limited time frame to give a natural shape and structure to your story.
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Exercise for March 26, 2002
In-Class Exercise
1. According to officials at Graceland, Elvis Presley receives an estimated one hundred Valentines a year. Write a story about one of them.
2. Write (or begin) a story set in the 1980's. Use as many period elements as possible.
3. Write (or begin) a story set in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant.
4. Write the first paragraph and last paragraph of a story. Try doing this by simply allowing the visual images to flood your mind, and take notes on the paper. Don't worry if there's no apparent connection between the beginning and end -- this sometimes works.
5. Thirty-four percent of new American public school teachers say they plan to quit their job within five years. Write about one of them.
Take-Home Exercise: Telling the Story
Read the handout stories, "Cat in the Rain" by Ernest Hemingway (from In Our Time) and "Snow Child" by Angela Carter (from The Bloody Chamber).
Note how Hemingway’s story shows the characters mainly through what can be outwardly observed: dialogue, action, gestures. Carter’s story, on the other hand, adopts a fairy-tale style and uses an omniscient narrator.
Write a short scene (it may be a complete short-short story, if you’d like, but doesn’t have to be) using one or the other technique. In other words: tell a story mainly through dialogue and action, or tell a "tale" through old-fashioned storytelling narrative.
You may want to try telling the same story both ways!
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Exercise for Class on Tuesday, March 19, 2002
A Trip to the Grocery Store
Imagine a character (or use a character from a work in progress.) List the following five things about him or her:
1. Something he/she loved in childhood and has since lost
2. What he/she thinks about first thing in the morning
3. An action he/she deeply regrets doing or not doing
4. Something he/she wants to do in the next year
5. A distinctive physical characteristic or nervous habit he/she has
Now, imagine that your character must run into the grocery store (or hardware store, convenience store, etc.--you choose) to pick up some needed items.
Make a shopping list with those five items.
Then, decide:
--Which item did he/she forget to buy?
--What item not on the list did he/she buy on impulse?
OPTIONAL: Write a short scene in which your character either visits the store and makes the impulse purchase, or comes home and realizes he/she has forgotten something on the list.
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Writing Exercise for March 12
Please choose one of the following and write for 15 minutes. These exercises are borrowed from The Writer's Block: 786 Ideas to Jump-Start Your Imagination. (FYI -- the highlighted text is a link to the book at Amazon if you're interested in knowing more about it).
1. Write an argument between two characters that begins in bed.
2. More than ten million prescription medications are filled incorrectly every year. Write about one of them.
3. Invent a character who must choose between the lesser of two evils.
4. Describe the secret life of a school bus driver.
5. Write a story that begins with the words, "Why didn't you call me?"
Copyright 2002-2003 Kiersten Marek unless otherwise specified. All rights reserved.