What's A Prickly Pear?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Sat, 25 May 1996 00:24:50 EDT

[Friday before a three-day weekend, a pile of work to do, and...nearly everyone has to stop by and tell me all about what they are doing on the weekend? So now I'm going to spend a chunk of my "holiday" trying to do what I thought I would be doing today? What's wrong with this picture?]

Ah, well. Let's quickly turn the pages of "The Writing Workshop, Vol. 2" by Alan Zeigler... oh, that should do the job...

1. Pick a small number. Anything between one to six will do just fine.

1. cantaloupe
2. persimmon
3. prune
4. avocado
5. grapefruit
6. raisin

(other exotic fruits might include prickly pear, starfruit, mango, papaya, or jockey shorts fresh off the loom? Your choice, just get your fruit armed:-)

2. One more number. Guess!

1. a bowl of snow
2. a desert of white sands
3. an ebbing tidal pool, surrounded by stones
4. a glacial wall of ice
5. a field of wheat baking under the August sun
6. a mountain spring of fresh, cold water

3. Pick another number, any number, just as long as it is a fairly small number (say one to six? I know you could say it!)

1. Love
2. Hate
3. Joy
4. Relief
5. Anticipation
6. Fear

(other emotions, if you don't like those, might include distress, relief, pride, gratitude, guilt, anger, or the cast of hundreds to be found in a thesaurus near you:-)

4. Your emotion IS those two, the fruit and the setting.

You may want to spend a few minutes writing down connections. What does the fruit and the setting have to do with each other? The fruit and the emotion? The setting and the emotion? Let your mind spin its own fine network of associations. Don't worry if something else comes in, that crystalline silverware probably helps you toss the salad?

5. Your job is to describe that fruit and that setting (related in any way your little fingers care to tap the keys) without telling us about the emotion--just make us feel it, show it to us, make us ache with it...

Start your fruit rotting now, please?

(That's not at all what Ziegler suggested, but maybe it will do the job. He has you brainstorming relationships, one liners, without any explanation, all for later expansion. For example, love is a tray of ice cubes. Love is a prickly pear. And so on. Tell you what, if you get bored with my little twisted play on relationships, go ahead and do his.)

One sentence to start? Okay, on your keys, get limbo, and...

"I could almost taste it," she said, and licked her lips.

Sleepily
Write!

Do A Little Dance...

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Sat, 18 May 1996 01:53:50 EDT

[Friday came late this week. Perhaps it wasn't Friday after all, but that's the way the bits roiled and flawed.]

Okay. Suppose you are trying to work out a character, to understand them, to really get inside that other skin. Here's an exercise aimed at helping you to do that...

Your character is at a party. There are lots of impressive people there, none of whom they have met before. The guests boast of their accomplishments-athletes, royalty, artists, all kinds of people. The host(ess) then turns to your character and says, "Well, we haven't seen you before. Who are you?" The room falls silent, the guests turn toward your character, and a hush falls, waiting for the response.

Introduce your character to the gathering, using any combination of lies and truth you prefer. You can have the character fantasize about who they would like to be, or simply say wild things to tantalize or provoke the guests. Reality limits are not in force--you can exaggerate their exploits, even over a period of centuries; they don't even have to be human. Or they can be all too human.

But present your character in a compelling way.

Show them to us.

[based on an exercise in The Writing Workshop, Vol. 2, by Alan Zeigler.]

Of course, one may adjust the party, the attendees, and other aggravation to suit, but show us how Pig Little waddles into the cowboy bar, what kind of punk rockers inhabit the place, and just how the ham got hung...make that party haughty!

For the single-sentence starter set? How about:

The door opened, and it fell in.

For those who have just joined the play, the single-sentence starters are sometimes used to start a story, poem, or other work. From there on, you simply have to add words, punctuation, occasional spacing and other keyboard glitz, until you come to a point of climax, and whatever postplay you feel is appropriate, then stop. I.e., do whatever you like!

Write soon, write late, but always write.

Who was on the telephone?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Wicked little cliffhanger . . .

Okay, here's the setup. There is a small group - say six or seven people - doing something together. In the show I was watching, they were having dinner together. And the phone rings. One of them answers it, says, "Hello. Oh. Yes." and turns and looks at the gathered people. Long pause.

And they ended today's episode, so we'll have to see what that was all about tomorrow!

So, your task, should you choose to accept it, is to lay out that scene. Have your people gather, and the phone rings. Given cell phones, this could happen almost anywhere. And someone answers it, says hello, and then . . . pause, look around, and . . .

This is where you decide. Do they hang up? Who was on the other end of the line? What was said that made them look around like that? What do they say to the people sitting there, and what is the reaction to all this? Do they take one person aside and whisper, do they simply blurt it out, what happens next?

One line?

We never thought that the phone ringing marked the end of our happiness.

Go, write!