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An Un-Friday Not-Quite Writing Exercise
Rosanna Stevens
Jul 27, 2010
Are you finding Friday Writing Exercises tie your knickers in a knot? Feeling anxious? Are you reaching the end of the blog post, opening a word document, and flopping toward the pantry door Piderman-style, in the hope you’ll chance upon food that was invisible five minutes earlier?
Unfortunately the pantry will only continue to offer stale starch, a strange breed of savoury conserve from a 2006 Christmas hamper, and a ransacked packet of snakes featuring only stiff orange and yellow. Worse still, you’ve given up on tapping out a Friday Writing Exercise post. The latter is a grand shame – I can only imagine the deliciously imaginative things you would have written (far better than anything in that bland old pantry).
I stumbled across (i.e. a very cool friend of mine linked me) this piece of fantastic last week, and couldn’t help but daydream about some of the wild responses y’all would invent. It’s not Friday, and this isn’t quite a writing exercise, but it might just loosen up those joints in lieu of the end of this week.
Friday Writing Exercise
Cathy Tran
Jul 24, 2010
Personally, I find descriptions to be the hardest part of a story. See, what happens is that I’ll have a rough plot in my head and there’s this part in the narrative that I desperately want to get to, because that’s the part I have the words for. But what about the other parts? What about setting up the scene, creating an image of my characters or adding that extra bit of depth? That’s unfortunately where the clichés come in.
For this exercise, I’m going to give you the beginnings of a sentence that requires you to follow up with a description. See if you can expand on it; create characters or scenes or emotions. As always, work with the first thing that pops into your head. However, watch out for phrases that you’ve read before, see if you can twist them round.
Bonus points if you can guess where I stole these from:
He looked down at me from his pedestal. ‘Have faith.’ Having faith in him was like…
To start the bar I’d borrowed as much as I could from every place that would lend me money, and I’d almost repaid it all. Things were settling down. Up until then, it had been a question of sheer survival, of keeping my head above water, and I didn’t have room to think of anything else. I felt like I’d…
That’s all it was. A huge plate of fat. His fingers found the fork. It seemed as if I was watching…
What they are hanging from is hooks. The hooks have been set into the brickwork of the Wall, for this purpose. Not all of them are occupied. The hooks look like…
Friday Writing Exercise
Madeleine Crofts
Jul 17, 2010
This exercise is about something you probably do every day anyway and if you don’t well then it’s time to start! It’s about: eavesdropping! Which is a wonderful word isn’t it? Time to drop some eaves people!
Eavesdropping on other people’s conversations can sometimes help with a piece of writing when you least expect it to, you are walking along thinking about something else then someone says something brilliant and you know how to keep going with that poem or story. But we are going to use eavesdropping consciously, to start to train your brain to be on the lookout for interesting words or phrases.
Your challenge is to start listening to other people’s conversations. Subtly of course. On the tram or the train, in the office, at school – anywhere! You need to find 5 phrases that grab you and write them down. Share them here on the blog! Then take all 5 and try and write them into an imagined conversation.
Remember we’re thinking about the way people actually talk and what makes their dialogue real and fresh and exciting to hear. Go forth and listen!
The Sketchbook Project
Nikita Vanderbyl
Jun 29, 2010
For those writers and artists who like Moleskines, and I’ve noticed there are a few of you. The Sketchbook Project is an opportunity to take part in a touring exhibition in the US. Sign up by 31 October 2010 and you’ll be sent a Moleskine to transform, return it and it’ll tour the US next year. Sketchbooks specifically tour Brooklyn NY, Austin TX, San Francisco CA, Portland ME, Atlanta GA and Chicago IL. There is a small fee for the Moleskine and the shipping, but it might be a small price to pay for international fame.
Friday Writing Exercise
Madeleine Crofts
Jun 25, 2010
Take a piece of paper and write ten sentences that each start with the words ‘Your mother’. The sentences don’t have to be related or connected to each other. Try to write quickly, writing the first things that come to your mind.
You should now have ten sentences that start with Your mother. If you like, choose one of those sentences and keep writing for about ten minutes. See what you get.
This exercise is good because the words Your mother have a lot in them. They set up three characters essentially, the narrator which is the ‘I’, another person which is the ‘you’ and of course, their mother. And mothers are typically an interesting subject, and if you are saying something about someone else’s mother then there is a wealth of potential for conflict, tension or humour there.
Friday Writing Exercise
Madeleine Crofts
Jun 18, 2010
For this exercise you need paper, a pen and a timer. There is one here (http://www.online-stopwatch.com/full-screen-stopwatch/) online if you need it. Set the timer to countdown ten minutes.
Now grab the book that is nearest to you. It needs to be a book, not a brochure or a magazine or a paper. A real, honest-to-goodness book. But it doesn’t matter which book.
Open it at page thirty-six and count seven lines down. Write this seventh line down on your piece of paper. Start writing. If you get stuck, rewrite the line from page 36. Write it over and over if you have to until something else comes out of the pen. Trust me, something else will come. Don’t stop writing for the whole ten minutes, don’t reread or edit or censor yourself. Just keep going. Stop at the end of ten minutes and see what you’ve got.
This exercise is good for getting started in a writing session, getting some words down on the page, but with a little help from another writer. It can be hard getting started, getting your writing muscles going. This helps. Do it more than once, using different books and different page and line numbers. Do it with a newspaper or a magazine. Change it up!
Friday Writing Exercise
Madeleine Crofts
Jun 11, 2010
For this exercise you need some tear-up-able paper and a pen. Take your paper and tear it into 6 pieces, each big enough to write a couple of words on. Also this random word generator makes this exercise all the more random.
Take three of your pieces of paper and write a noun on each. That could be any kind of noun, concrete noun, abstract noun, common noun. Noun away! So for example, I might write:
Belonging
Flame
Apple
Then take your remaining three pieces of paper and write three adjectives. Describing words. For example:
Derogatory
Shining
Powerful
Now put them together so you have three phrases. I got:
Powerful Belonging
Shining Apple
Derogatory Flame
Hmm.. Now choose a phrase and write from it for 10 minutes. Set that timer! See what you get, take it any way it goes. You don’t even have to use that specific phrase if you don’t want to. This exercise can be great for making great connections and images appear.
music for writing
Sam Cooney
Jun 10, 2010
Do you like to write with music playing, either in the background or blasting in your earphones? Or do you prefer silence?
I almost always need music to write. It’s become a need, mainly because I’m always writing in a busy space – home (with many housemates), cafes (with angry baristas) or libraries (with yelpy weirdos) – but also because it channels my thoughts.
John Cleese says this about creativity: ‘The most dangerous thing when writing is to be interrupted.’ He recommends creating boundaries of space (in conjunction with boundaries of time) so that you create an oasis in which to write. Cleese likens creativity to a tortoise. Only when it feels safe will it poke its head out, and the slightest disturbance can scare it back inside its enclosure.
I think that for me, having the appropriate music (turned up to eleven) gives me a space by blocking out all aural interruptions. And subsequently any visual distractions (like in a public place) become redundant as they have no aural context.
For a while, way back when, I was able to write to any music – even the radio was fine. As long as it played without me having to do anything, I was okay. I’d have Bob Dylan carping or Leonard Cohen rumbling or Iron and Wine trolololololing all around the room, and I would write.
Reading Space
Adolfo Aranjuez
Jun 09, 2010
In my childhood I used to descend into the subterranean levels of my family’s holiday home in the Philippine mountains. Down there the incandescent light bulbs always seemed dimmer, less able to illuminate the shoulder-width corridors that led to the myriad tenants’ rooms I was too wary to explore. Down there I seemed to always find myself hastening, quickening the shifting of my legs towards somewhere else – to the exit leading to the greenery, to the stairway from which I came – anywhere but there. It was as though I could never return to the safety of the ground level again, caught in the clutches of imagined catacomb-demons.
But I had also treaded the winding steps that brought me to the second storey of the same house. Although not entirely an attic, it contained what were to my nascent mind various items of ‘treasure’: unused bed sheets that smelled of pinewood; the odd cockroach egg, which, mind you, I never touched; packs of yellowing playing cards abandoned in the far-right corners of unlocked drawers. There, where I could stumble upon and revisit ostensibly magical paraphernalia, where firewood crackled as I watched from a balcony, where I could examine guests as they entered and egressed, I felt like things were less sinister, safer.
Connecting Voices – Connecting With You?
Liam Wood
Jun 08, 2010
Recently I was lucky enough to get a late call up from our fantastic Artistic Director Bel Schenk to take part in Connecting Voices, an Express Media project, masterfully conceived and run by former Exress Media Arts Management intern Sara Daly. The project is designed to train a group of young writers to run creative writing workshops in the community.
I got invited along because a group of us from Ed Comm will be running workshops at the National Young Writers’ Festival during the This is Not Art Festival in Newcastle later this year. And without our resident Voiceworks workshop guru Maddie Crofts who will be on an overseas adventure there will be some mighty big boots to fill.
Fortunately, although not unexpectedly, the connecting voices event was amazing. Run by performance poet extraordinaire Emilie Zoey Baker and attended by some truly exceptional people (I’m certainly glad I didn’t have to go through the application process) we spent a full day running all sorts of games and writing exercises. From funny sounds and strange words, to intentionally awful poetry – I won’t include my entire heinous love poem here as it is truly vomit inducing but let’s just say it included unbreakable chains forged in the fires of my heart and pinning butterflies of passion to the cork board of my soul. Wow I feel sick just looking over it but in a good way, like after eating too many gummy bears.
Nonetheless there was plenty of great writing going on as every participant ran a pre-planned workshop activity and they really were wonderful. If you want more evidence check out the reflections of another participant Megan Burke.
The good news is there are now a dozen or so trained up workshop leaders looking to go out and run workshops in their community so if you have a group that could benefit from a few hours of writerly stimulation why don’t you get in touch with us by emailing Bel at artisticdirector@expressmedia.org.au and hopefully we can connect up with you …
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