More good stuff (see here for background):
For vulnerability/introductions
1. List 3 moments in which you felt you were not yourself.
2. Distribute lists randomly among the class.
3. Write a story using at least two of the three thingsFirst page exercise
1. Share and read the first page of a new or in-progress story, in a group of 3.
2. The two readers should a. describe the story, b. say where they think it is going, c. name what is most interesting.
3. Rewrite your opening without looking at the old first page.For audience:
1. Name the one person or few people who first see your work/to whom you’re writing and who would get every reference—e.g. my best friend from grad school.
2. Describe an audience of about 1,000 who would be ideal readers for your book/whom you hope to reach—e.g. college graduate male Korean American adoptees politically active between 30 and 40, in a heterosexual relationship with kids, who read more than 20 books a year.
3. Describe an audience of about 20,000 who would make your book a best-seller–—e.g. college graduate Asian Americans between 30 and 40, with kids, who are politically active and read more than 20 books a year.For plot/the “but for” moment:
1. In five minutes, write as many sentences as you can that follow this format: If s/h/t hadn’t __________, __________ wouldn’t have ___________.
2. Expand one of the sentences into a paragraph, including a full set of actions and character(s).
3. Expand the paragraph into a scene.For characterization:
In five minutes, write as many sentences as you can about the same character that begin: S/h/t was the type of person who _________. Push past the obvious and easy.
For point of view:
1. Tell the story of a moment that happened to you this week, but in third person. Create a character to fit the scene/fictionalize.
2. Go ten years in the future. That moment has turned out to be extremely momentous—it has changed this character’s life. Now tell the moment from the perspective of the character ten years on, looking back with a sense of how momentous the moment turned out to be. Do this in first person.For voice:
1. List your fears, both past and present.
2. Write a scene in which one of your fears plays out. Write it in the victim’s voice.
3. Write the same scene from the aggressor’s voice. Or perhaps from the voice of a non-active witness.For structure:
Write a structural metaphor for your story–e.g. the dolphin that surfaces beside the boat as a structural metaphor for the way the story keeps skimming along the surface/dipping into the past. (Bad example, but you get the point.)
For prolepsis & true/false mystery:
Write a short story that starts with the sentence: “By the end of this story, character x and character y will fall in love and, in so-doing, character x will murder character y.
For tone:
Exaggerate an inconsequential event in which you participated sometime this week.
For objects:
Write a story with two important objects in play, one on display in the story and one hidden.
As a nonexpert these strike me as interesting, but fairly random. It doesn’t seem like it would be hard to come up with a lengthy list of writing prompts that would be equally interesting – is there a clear structure of thinking behind these? I don’t know. But I am not overly impressed by what seems like a scattering of more and less interesting thought exercises. I am tempted to translate such an exercise into something I know more about – data analysis. I can easily envision a series of prompts for exploratory analysis of a data set – because I, like many others on this blog, have used such exercises in classes we teach. What would distinguish among such exercises would be the logical structure behind these prompts. For data analysis, some prompts make more sense to me than others. For example, an interesting prompt for some time series data might be to visualize it as a distribution vs as a time series and comment on the differences/similarities. I suppose the writing prompts in this post should be viewed in a similar fashion: do they form a logical structure? It isn’t obvious to me, though I admit I have no expertise in this area.
Dale –
I’m not sure why, for creative writing, it would be important for their to be a theoretical underpinning. That said, I would imagine that to some extent many of these prompts are based upon a general principle of building on the adage of “write what you know.” These seem like really good prompts to me, that would stimulate and generate some interesting writing.
In the other hand, as you suggest I think it would be a great idea of creating a list of prompts for promoting the skills and habits that undepin expository writing – and that are based on an underlying theoretical model of what comprises good academic/expository writing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone build an instructional model for teaching academic writing that uses a prompt-based approach for having students build their skills through a kind of practice and expertise building as do many models for the teaching of creative writing.
or important for there to be. Sheece.
Yeah, but this is more general-purpose writing and I think that scientific writing is a bit of a different animal. Drafting abstracts as exercised for mock research projects in undergraduate was helpful, having writing reviewed by an adviser in grad school, etc. There’s different styles. Someone I worked with liked to keep their writing as brief as possible, but they were presenting information that could be summarized as such.
“1. List 3 moments in which you felt you were not yourself.”
This is how Werner Erhard’s “Est” session began (I did not do it, I only attended the orientation.) You are supposed to believe that it allows you to transcend your normal perspective. The problem is that the stuff you come up with may (or may not) be interesting to others, but it most certainly is not interesting to YOU. The aspects of yourself that are interesting to you are the ones that manifest when you are yourself, and that is what good writers write about. Your stories about when you were not yourself might be embarrassing and maybe you won’t know it. That’s what everyone is hoping for, including your bored instructor.
I don’t think successful creative writers draw inspiration from the times when they were not themselves.