EXERCISE: When The Cold Winds of Mortality Blow

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 22:09:00 -0400

(from watching an ad about life insurance, no less!)

Here's the plot.

First, pick a likely gaggle of characters.  Feel free to use the ones you're working with on something else.

Second, pick one of them.  For their own reasons (what are they?), they have recently:

1. Drawn up a last will and testament
2. Bought additional life insurance
3. Gone out to check graveyard plots
4. Drawn up a "living will"
5. Checked out the local mortuary
6. Bought a coffin

Now, let's assume that this recent activity becomes known to the other characters (feel free to invent ways for them to learn about this).

What do they do?  What questions do they ask our pallbearer?  What kind of response do they get from the person who is looking at the trappings of mortality?

Write up that scene.  Let them argue about the appropriateness of buying your own coffin, while sitting in the local pizza parlor.  Or perhaps the airport is the background for a chit-chat about investing in a grassy spot in the cemetery?

Anyway, let the cold wind blow a little shiver up your characters' lives, and tell us about how they react.

EXERCISE: Four Quotes

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Fri, 18 Oct 2002 05:57:30 -0400

What, no thoughts stirring in the depths of the cybernetic jungle? Take an idea break!  Here's how.

Go to <http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3>

Get 4 random quotes from across the collected wisdom...

The following quotations were randomly selected from the collections you selected below .

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Euripides (485 BC - 406 BC)

Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special. Fran Lebowitz

Reality is a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs. Lily Tomlin
- More quotations on: [Reality]

All our progress is an unfolding, like a vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end. though you can render no reason. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

All Right?  Get on your keyboards, get ready, and...

Write a little exploration of these four notions.  What do they have in common, how do they differ, where would you use them?

Convert into characters!  Suppose each of these represented the theme, the core belief, the essence of a character.  What would that character be like? Suppose they have met (where?)  What happens when Emerson crosses words with Tomlin?

Ponder away.

Go ahead, let these four seeds unfold into your writing.