EXERCISE: Four Quickies For the Holiday

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 09:38:28 -0500

This may be a bit late, but if you happen to be headed for a ringside seat at a family table, or perhaps a couchside lounge in the family room with the television blasting football and the food crying "eat me" as the old frictions and fancies of the family and friends are rehearsed and remembered...

Or whatever you may happen to be doing this holiday.

Some quick writing exercises, suitable for mental stretching or even perhaps a quick note or three.

1.  Look around!

Take a good, hard look at what is happening.  Consider how you might relate this to a reader (in tale, poetry, or other wordy forum at your behest -- avoid the bark, get right down to the wordy heart).  What details would you include to put the reader in the middle of the scene.  What would you leave out?  How would you have them enter, or leave?

What would help them understand Aunt Agnes?  Or what about Odd Jack's little quirks?

Just consider wrapping this scene in words.  What senses would you titillate, and how?  What observations (dry or quite damp) would you pontificate?

(bonus points for translations across time, cultures, and places.  E.g., what if your fine friends were celebrating at the Bastille?  Or perhaps on Babylon 4?)

2.  Add A Character

Consider a character.  It may be one of your invention or one of the classics (Cervantes?  A mythical model?  Gods and goddesses, madonnas and dons, weavers and unwoven, take your pick of them all.

And think about what happens when they walk in, sit down, and start talking.

How does Uncle John deal with Aphrodite coming to call?

Do you really think Superman would be comfortable carving the turkey?

Go ahead, let your imagination run weird!

(bonus for realizing that Uncle John IS Aphrodite, in drag! and expanding on why this is...)

3.  Now, Take Someone Out

Suppose that someone couldn't make it.  What happens to the familiar exchanges when Grandfather isn't there to laugh at the punch lines?

And think about the various scenes as people realize that the expected one isn't coming.  What do they start to imagine as reasons for the absence?  Does the heart grow fonder, or is there some anger at this unexpected non-interaction?

Then, if you like, you can always close the imaginary scene up with the information that the absent member... had an accident?  Won the Lottery and is celebrating as far away as possible?  Was last seen wandering downtown, looking for flowers to put in their hair?  Who knows, you make up a next step...

(my goodness, you want to make them disappear one by one into the basement?  Who knows what horror lurks in the hallway closet?  The writer do! :-)

4.  Metamorphic Metaphors (not petit fours, meta-fors!)

Consider various and sundry parts of the holiday.  The parade, the feast (or famine), the handshakes, the travel, presents, decorations...

Pick one and expand it.  What do the little white booties on the turkey look like to you?  Can you imagine trying to put them on that hot steaming meat?  And when they are pulled off, sitting forlorn by the skeletal remains of the butchered bird, what do they remind you off then?

The "lifecycle" of the focus, its parts and processing, what does it remind you of -- consider these various questions, and see if you can splice a metaphor (or at least an analogy) out of this.  Consider how it might relate to some abstraction (life, riches, happiness, plenty of generalities to go around, no pushing, just pick one off the queue and come back later if you want another one).

Look around, add a character, take someone out, and watch for metaphoric ambiguity...

Oh, and enjoy the holiday!

EXERCISE: fried scruples

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Thu, 05 Apr 2001 11:17:19 -0400

OK, here is the challenge...

Take a number from 1 to 5.  Go ahead, pick whichever one you like.

(Got one?  No, don't read any further until you have picked your number.  Take your time, I'll wait.  So... have you got your number now?)

See what you have picked:

1. Your fiance/e discovers that s/he has a terminal illness that can drag on indefinitely.  Do you break the engagement?  What happens?
2. Someone extends his friendship but you aren't interested.  Later you learn that he is a legal wizard.  You need free advice desperately and don't know anyone else.  Do you call him?
3. At lunch, your colleagues are running down the work of another colleague who is absent.  Do you speak up for the absent co-worker?
4. A house painter asks why you didn't hire him.  The only problem is his lack of personal hygiene.  Do you tell him?
5. Your neighbor in an adjacent apartment building insists on doing yoga nude, in full view.  Do you complain to your neighbor's landlady?

There you go.  A little matter of scruples, ethics, and similar diversions, courtesy of the game "A Question of Scruples."

Now, your task, should you choose to accept it, is to consider this ethical thorniness as the root or seed of a story.

How do you engorge this beginning into a tale of tawdriness?

What kind of thinking do you do, how do you develop the characters, how do you plot the actions that will show the theme, how do you...

Oh, yes, go ahead and develop your story.  And while you're doing that, keep track of how your own thinking works.

Then, if you would, let's discuss both the fine process that took you from a scrupular dilemma to the tale that howled, and also the tale in all its toldness.

Got it?  Two results: one, the story.  Two, the story of the story, or how I wrote my tale.

Sound interesting?  Then let the words crackle.

EXERCISE: Who Was In That Car?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 23:25:45 -0400

Okay, a quick scene for you to fill in, as you please.

On the way to work this morning, I walked past several cars stopped at a stoplight.  In about the fourth car back, a man sat.  He was the driver, with one hand out the open window waving a cigarette.  His face seemed agitated, perhaps angry, perhaps upset.

He was the only person in the car.

And he was talking loudly, perhaps even yelling!  Looking down and in, as if the radio or perhaps the gear shift was somehow the focus of his emotion, he was talking away.

I could see his mouth working, quite obviously forming words.  Given the background noise at that intersection, I couldn't hear what he was saying, nor could I tell who he was talking to.  Maybe the radio, maybe the 6 foot rabbit sitting invisibly beside him, perhaps the fairy princess sitting on the floor on the passenger side?  How about the alien from planet Gurk reposing on the floor?

Or the brother who died 30 years ago?

The boss he would face in an hour?

Who do you think he was talking to?  And what was he saying?

Okay?  So here's your job -- take that person.  Show us where they have come from, why they are upset, and what happens next!

Write?