Quick exercise for the day: Random word jumpstart

Often the challenge in getting your draft written is just getting yourself to write . . . the next . . . sentence. And then the next.

Here's a quick jumpstart for when you're feeling stuck.

Random Word Jumpstart

Open your document to the next scene you have to write. Go to this random word generator. Take the five words it suggests. The next sentence you write has to contain the first one. The second sentence, the second one. Until you get to five. (Set a timer for ten minutes and do this fast.) Yes, all of this has to happen within the context of writing your next scene.

Exercise for the day: Draw your story

Sometimes when I start new classes, as I did last week at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center, I talk myself through my nervousness by thinking of my job not as teaching, but as listening.

I think about ways I can listen to writers: to their work, their feelings about their work, their questions about it. How can I ask new questions and see things from different angles?

Here's something I tried last week that gave me(and the writers. an interesting visual snapshot of where they are with their work now, at the beginning of the fall session.

I put my kids' magic markers in a bag, brought them to class, and dumped them out in the middle of our big table. I gave everyone 11  x 17 paper and asked them to turn it to landscape orientation. 

Turning paper sideways (an idea often used with mind mapping), and using different colors and sizes of markers are all ways to pop yourself out of the linear, purely verbal, black-and-white thinking you most often use when you're writing, editing, and revising. 

I set the timer for seven minutes and asked everyone to make a visual representation of their plot-- in ANY way they wanted. Using shapes, figures, squiggles, words, colors. I emphasized there was no pressure to be artistic or clever; that if your best visualization is nothing but a straight red line, or a frowny face with a tear coming out of its eye, that's valid. Everything is valid, as long as it's honest. 

Then we went around the table and had each person explain how they're seeing their book right now, using what they'd drawn. After each person spoke we responded with our impressions.

Try it! 

Draw your story

Get a piece of paper (11 x 17, regular printer paper, whatever) and some colors (markers, pens, pencils). Turn the paper sideways. Set the timer for seven minutes. Set down any kind of visual representation of your plot, moving from one end of the paper to the other. 

This is a way of listening to yourself, and seeing your story from a new angle. What do you learn about your story from doing this? What's strong in it? What's missing? 

Exercise of the Day 9/15: Evil twin

My fall classes have started so I'm going back to posting more exercises of the day. I started this as a way to record exercises I often use.

This week in one of my HVWC classes we talked about how easy it is to get in a rut with your main character. We often give our protagonists so much baggage: we want them to represent us, or to read as a good/moral/smart person. Minor characters can do fun and unexpected things while our heroes get sort of stiff and stuck. For this I like to suggest an exercise called "Evil Twin."

Evil Twin

Think of the next scene you need to write or revise. Set the timer for fifteen minutes. Instead of writing what your main character would do in this situation, write what their evil twin would do.

--

People often find they want to actually use this scene when it's done.

The secret is that your character's evil twin is actually your character. Just the part of themselves that they try to keep hidden.

Try it!


Note: My use of the singular "they" is intentional. Let's all start using it!

Exercise for the day, 8/10: Make some rules

"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance."

—James Baldwin 

What is your daily writing practice? Do you have one? Or do you too often let your writing time disappear because loading the dishwasher seems more urgent, or you're afraid the stuff you're writing isn't worthwhile?

Working on it is how you make it worthwhile. How you find out what is alive in it and what needs to be changed. What you care about vs what you were just faking.

I find it most helpful to write down one simple goal at a time, and put it somewhere I can see it (not just in my head). E.g. a post-it that says, "1,000 words/day" stuck to my computer. I tend to get distracted, so this keeps bringing me back to that one simple goal. Everything else is optional.

Here's a description of a more elaborate system from Aimee Bender. Hers includes accountability. Like having a jogging buddy, it can be great to have a writing buddy. This summer I've been pairing up my students to set daily goals and text each other a pencil emoji each day when they reach their goal. It's amazing how much it can help to know that someone out there is going to notice whether you text your pencil today or not.

Exercise for the day, 8/9: Do not mention the murder

Some exercises in description from John Gardner's classic The Art of Fiction. 

4a. Describe a landscape as seen by an old woman whose disgusting and detestable old husband has just died. Do not mention the husband or death. 

4b. Describe a lake as seen by a young man who has just committed murder. Do not mention the murder. 

4c. Describe a landscape as seen by a bird. Do not mention the bird. 

4d. Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, war, death, or the old man doing the seeing; then describe the same building, in the same weather and at the same time of day, as seen by a happy lover. Do not mention love or the loved one.

What do these have in common? They all concern description. They all use the phrase "as seen by," asking you to notice how your POV character's subjective way of seeing influences what appears in your story.  They all ask you to make us feel an emotional truth of the story by showing it though the character's experience, without telling us directly what it is.

(Note in 4d the phrase, in the same weather and at the same time of day. No rain for sadness/sunny days for happiness.)

You could choose one of these and spend ten minutes on it. Then, next time you sit down with your own story, think about how the surroundings are filtered through your character's experience. How description can be a tool to show your characters' emotions. How even a landscape can be saturated with mood and meaning.

Exercise for the day, 8/8: The spine of your story

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

—Jorge Luis Borges

For a minute, stop thinking about all the games you may want your story to play, and think about this. At a basic level, almost every story is about 

a character (at least one) 

who takes a journey 

from Point A to Point B. 

This could be an emotional journey, a physical one, or both. In some way, the character starts in one place on the first page, and ends up somewhere different by the last page. 

Who is your main character? Just for now, pick one.

What is the journey? Describe it in one sentence.

What is Point A--that is, where do we find your character on page 1?

What is Point B--what is the different place your character gets to by the last page?

Exercise for the day, August 7: Fix

Well, my process kind of works sideways. I never really think about taking on an issue or writing about a certain thing. It’s more about trying to find a voice that is fun to do and in which I can feel some sort of power. . . And then at some point you look up and you’ve made a person, who is in a certain fix. . . 

—George Saunders

George Saunders is a popular author (once had an essay featured on a Chipotle bag) and a writer's writer (lots of us love hearing him talk about his process, as here). His approach is literary: humane, intuitive, exploratory, character-focused. All things that feel familiar from my years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. 

I was surprised and thrilled when, years later, I read my first book on screenwriting. The blunt talk about plots, the nuts and bolts of creating momentum and excitement, hooking the audience, controlling pacing, raising stakes . . . these were things we were practically forbidden to talk about in graduate school. Why? The emphasis there was on creating literature, on some kind of search for truth that could not be hemmed in by prescriptive approaches. 

But really, when you come down to it, all of us have to navigate the same waters. We all have to deal with art and craft, character and plot, logic and mystery, creation and revision. 

Anyway, there's a short, fun screenwriting book called Save the Cat by Blake Snyder which I refer to a lot in my classes. It's incredibly prescriptive. In Snyder's carefully laid out theory, your story must have a handful of specific beats, and there's an actual page number where each one has to occur. Everything can be neatly plotted out on index cards. Very comforting. Even though it's an illusion. Even though I know that in reality Snyder had to trek through the same swamps as the rest of us, his thoughts about plot can be very useful.

Here's an exercise I like to do in class:

Six things that need fixing. This is my phrase, six is an arbitrary number, that stands for the laundry list you must show — repeat SHOW — the audience of what is missing in the hero's life. Like little time bombs, these Six Things That Need Fixing, these character tics and flaws, will be exploded later in the script, turned on their heads and cured.  

—Blake Snyder, Save the Cat 

Take ten minutes and brainstorm about your main character at the beginning of your story. What, in their life, needs fixing? Or in Saunders' words, what kind of fix are they in?

Note: Brainstorming means you write down any crazy idea that comes along, even if it makes no sense. You can always cross them off later. Don't stop writing till the timer goes off.