Discovering the Writer Within

Let The Rivers Rush

In this exercise you were asked to choose one unforgettable place you've been and freewrite about it. Place plays an important part in most of our lives, and it's an important source of material for writing. Finish today's writing by building a quick list in your journal of other places that might have significance to you. Choose another place from this list and freewrite about it for ten minutes.

The Thicker Stew

As a fun project, reserve several pages in your journal and make a list of every person you've ever known. Find your own methods of remembering. You may want to work chronologically or simply catalog different areas of your life. Don't labor. Don't worry if you don't get everybody. Let your list grow in leaps and spurts. Carry it with you to work and muse about it in your spare time.

Later, go back over your list and circle and names that seem to jump out at you. Make brief notes about them or do ten minute freewrites. Keep them as a reservoir of ideas to draw on in the future.

A Roomful of Details

Choose another significant detail from your list above, and freewrite for another seven minutes, using the detail as a starting point. Or see if any of these things might trigger more writing. Brainstorm a list of:

Your heroes; Risks you've taken; Toys you played with as a child; Food you love to eat; Pets that meant something to you; Music that has touched you; Books that inlfuenced you; Possessions you've treasured; Embarrassing moments; Teachers you've had; Sexual experiences

Find something that begs to be written about. Freewrite for ten minutes, starting with that. Let the writing run out ahead of you. Rummage through the back shelves of your mind and discover all the treasures you've stored there.

Climbing and Diving

Write about a dramatic childhood experience in the first person present tense, as if you were a child. For example: "I sit in the chair. The dentist moves towrard me." Brainstorm, cluster, or just dive in and freewrite for ten minutes. Take the time to settle down. Let yourself slip into your childlike skin. Begin.

Read over what you wrote, then freewrite for another ten minutes as an adult, being in some way critical of the experience. For example: "I never knew the meaning of fear until I took my first trip to the dentist."

More Climbing and Diving

Using your freewrite, your list of details, and any insights you gained about the meaning of the photograph, compose a paragraph that would explain to someone else how you interpret the image.

Life on Tralfamadore

Think about your own father or mother. Cluster or brainstorm about them, trying to dig up moments from your childhood. Pick one moment and freewrite about it for ten minutes.

Look over what you've written and choose one word to describe the overall mood of the writing. Freewrite for another five minutes about that word and how it applies to your relationship with your parents since.

Learning to Love Confusion

Try brainstorming a list of things you think you could never write about because they seem too painful, or confusing, or unclear. Pick one and write your way into it for five minutes, starting anywhere. Sometimes the things that we try to keep at arm's length are the things we most want to understand.

If You Can't Be James Joyce, Why Bother?

Here are a few ways to combat the demons of doubt. Try any that may be of help to you.

Look through your own books or go to a library. Seek out authors who feed your desire to write. Remember, these writers won't necessarily be your favorite authors, or even ones that you like. Make a list of them and keep a few of their books near your writing area. Love them or loathe them, these writers will remind you, any time your confidence sags, that words on a page matter.

Make a list of all your best writing experiences. Keep it in your journal as ammunition when doubts strike.

Read interviews with other writers and copy down quotes that make you want to write. Read the classics or the comics, whichever inspires you more.

Acknowledge your moods. Know the difference between your Watcher and your demon. If you sense yourself being overly critical, stop. Lower your standards or work on something else.

The Magic Flashlight

Try writing fifteen leads to pieces you will probably never write . Leads like: "On a plane thirty thousand feet above the Mediterranean, Blake decided there was more to life than selling candy bars," or "She told him no, but Kurby Price didn't have the two-letter word in his vocabulary."

Write leads to tacky romance novels, leads to mysteries, leads to thrillers, newspaper stories, and autobiographical novels. Remember that writing leads is fun. Be daring. Be sensational. Be cheap. Don't be afraid to grab the reader by the lapels and drag the reader in. Don't forget to enjoy yourself. Out of your leads pick one or two that are particularly compelling and compose for ten minutes. If possible try swapping leads with a friend. See what happens when they follow yours and you follow theirs. Remember what Elmore Leonard says: "Writers write for the same readers read: to find out what's going to happen."

The Horse Race of Meaning

Close your eyes for a moment and think about the essay or story you plan to write. Now, on a blank piece of paper in your journal, draw a picture of the essay.

Yes, I know you are not an art student. Pretend you are da Vinci and fill the page with the characters and ideas from your story or essay. Don't be embarrassed to draw stick figures. Maybe you're not da Vinci. Maybe you are a caveman scratching out your vision of the world on the limestall walls. Begin.

Stand back from your drawing and notice what information seems most central, what has drifted to the background. Write a lead which seems to sum up the drawing.

Getting to the Draft

Type the draft from your journal. You'll see plenty in your draft that displeases you. As you're typing, though, make sure you notice things you like, including lines or passages that sound good to you. Look for any clues about meaning; is there a paragraph or sentence that hints at or proclaims the results of the horse race of meaning in your story or essay.

Resist the temptation to perform major surgery on your draft as you type it. Save that for tomorrow.

The Myth of The Boring Story

Take a few minutes and think about the most boring story you can imagine, a story like, "I went to the laundromat, did my laundry and came home." Write your one paragraph story at the top of a blank page.

Now, compose a new story about the same subject that is not boring. You may wish to change the point of view, or maybe just describe the laundromat in an unusual way. Take the time to write a few leads before you begin. Circle your subject to find the right angle.

Here are a few tips to help keep you working when you feel bored with your writing.

Work on something new. Part of boredom with material comes from overexposure. Starting new things helps to keep ideas popping in the old things you're working on.

Spend a few minutes a day freewriting about your piece. Write about your feelings toward it and how they've changed. Try to get a picture of how the piece is developing or not developing. Label your boredom and you may begin to see how to relabel your excitement.

Go for walks, play tennis, swim, run, go to a movie, read. Do anything but write for a day or two. Think about your piece as a difficult mathematical problem you are musing about. Don't allow yourself to indulge in regativity. Though you may never find the answer, you must never lose sight of the question.

Realize that writing is a roller coaster. If you are down, you will go up. And the higher you go up, the faster you come down. Don't be discouraged when your enthusiasm comes down too low. Don't get too excited when you go up too high. Pace yourself.

The Myth of The Boring Storyteller

Freewrite for ten minutes:

1] In the voice of your father or mother, describing you.
2] In the voice of yourself as a very young child describing one of your parents.
3] In the voice of a monster that haunted your childhood.
4] In the voice of a member of the opposite sex forty years older than you.
5] In the voice of a foreigner describing Americans.
6] In the voice of a martian describing a bowling alley.

Humor is A Frog

Start a fumor file. Clip newspaper articles that make you smile and shake your head and say to yourself, "Gosh, what a crazy world we live in." Paste them into your journal. Repeat this exercise when you're looking for something to experiment with.

You'd be amazed at how much topical material you can find in the paper with comic potential. In my file I've got an article about a cardboard cop that sits in a patrol car and intimidates drivers in Marlborough, New Hampshire. A creation of the police chief's wife, Marlene, "Captain cardboard" sports glasses and a neatly trimmed moustache. "She cut it out, we put it in the cruiser, and God it works good," said the chief. She must have cut a fine figure, I thought.

Me and The Tramp

Here are a few workouts to loosen up the funny bone. Pick one or two and fiddle with them in your journal.

Put a square peg in a round hole. Send a hard-boiled detective to the laundromat with his mother's clothes, or make a beatnik the president of the U.S. and have him read his inaugural speec. Find a vouce or character then slip them into a situation that is totally absurd for them to be in. Then write about it in their voice. For a review of this exercise, go back and read "The Myth of The Boring Storyteller."

Steve Martin says that to be funny you have to feel funny. Write when you feel funny or figure out ways to get yourself in a funny mood. Wear funny clothes or talk to yourself in a Daffy Duck voice, or roll around in a tub of lime and Jell-O, etc.

Listen and read the masters - new and old. Buy tapes or borrow them. Read Thurber and Keillor and Ephron and Twain. Imitate their voices on the page. Listen and look for the pauses. Learn that jokes occur often in the spaces between the lines.

Make a list of all the embarrassing things that happened to you that you laugh about now. The more embarrassing then, the more funny now, is the general rule.

Woddy Allen says, "When you write humor you don't sit at the grown-ups table." He's right. So watch children. Sit with them. Especially three to five year olds. Listen to their puns and notice how easy it is to joke with them. Find the child inside yourself and you will find your funny bone.

The Telling Question

Get some listening practice. Call up a friend or relative, tell him or her that you want to do an interview. Meet at their house, the local cafe, or in the park - someplace relaxed and comfortable. Prepare some questions beforehand, but never feel bound to ask them. Listen carefully, and take notes in your journal. Find the questions that will encourage your subject to share anecdotes about their life, perhaps like the short autobiography you wrote for the first part of this workout. Don't finish until you've collected at least three. Remember the questions that allowed you to say, "Tell me more." Save your notes for later.

The Telling Line

Look through the conversation you eavesdropped on. Circle lines which seem revealing. Go back to the interview you did for yesterday's follow-through and do the same thing. Read the lines out loud and listen to your voice. What does it reveal about the speaker's relationship with themselves and for the world?

Now ask yourself, "What is bad dialogue?"

It's phony. It's trite. It's characters who seem to say what their authors want them to rather than what's in their heads. Above all else, it's predictable.

Picture Batman and Robin on the conveyour belt heading fore a buzz saw. Robin turns to Batman and says, "Holy sawdust, Batman. What are we gonna do?" Batman gets that strained look on his face and says, "If I could just reach my Bat knife..." What would these two say and do if they were not simply cartoon characters? If this was real life and they were real people?

Pick two characters and a somewhat cliched dramatic situation. For example, a husband is leaving his wife or visa versa. Write a flat dialogue between the two, trying to keep in mind the basic principles of bad dialogue writing, i.e., predictability, triteness, phoniness. You may wish to begin, "You never loved me."

What are the worst lines? Why? Which lines seemed to be moving toward good dialogue? Why? How could you change the scene to make it into good dialogue? How could you make it worse?

Beyond The Words

It takes practice to look beyond the voices of the people we write about for the more subtle clues about who they are.

Return to your notes from the interview on "The Telling Question". Read them over and reflect on the person you interviewed.

Try to come up with one word that captures your strongest impression of him or her. Spend ten minutes freewriting on your journal about where that impression came from. Be as specific as possible. Think about not only what they said during the interview, but how they live, how they handle themselves, how they look.

If you can, spend more time with them, fleshing out more specifics that contribute to that impression (or perhaps suggest another), paying attention to the revealing subtleties we talked about there.

Make A Scene

Once your people are speaking, you are on your way to writing a scene. A scene is simply dialogue mixed with action and exposition. At the very least, exposition tells us who is speaking: "I'm home honey," he said as he walked through the door. But when a writer really has control over his or her craft, exposition can help bring dialogue to life, frame the speaker's words to a time and a place that makes it more real for the reader, and reveal the relationship between what people do and what they say (see The Telling Line and Beyond the Words).

Through The Glass Door

Brainstorm a list of subjects that raise questions for you that can be abswered through research. Maybe you went to Spain and watched a bullfight. You want to write about the experience, but you wonder how bullfights became such an important part of Spanish culture. Maybe you're writing a short story about what it's like to be dead. You are interested in people who were legally dead but later were brought back to life. What did they say about it?

Try composing a street scene set in your hometown a hundred years ago. Research the period and incorporate as many specifics as you can.

The Road is Chasing Us

Look at your new planet. Circle the details which anchor it to the one we live on. If you don't find any strong ones, try imagining some more.

Here are some exercises to help warm up your imaginative brain muscles.

Do some research at the library or observe some animal. using what you've learned, write a scene or a simple description from that animal's point of view.

Create a monster or imaginary animal. Brainstorm lists of facts and information about it before you start writing. Read Dr. Seuss for inspiration.

Creat a perfect world, a Utopia. Make lists of the details of this world. When you've done, pick a person living in the world and describe "a normal day."

Go to McDonald's or Burger King, or any other public place. Don't eat. Sit there at a booth or table. Close your eyes. Pretend you have just landed from another planet. Write a letter back home.

Try creating a new world with one sentence. Then describe that world in closer detail. Write a short prose poem or paragraph.

Seeing the Man in the Moon Again

The more we greet the world with the openness of a child, and invite the kind of madness that comes when the words rush pell mell to the page, the more likely we are to find metaphors. Try these to induce metaphor madness.

Repeat the earlier exercise, but this time work with a feeling instead of an idea. Think about how you feel at this moment (tired,frustrated,giddy,etc.), Put it in the nucleus of a cluster and see what grows from it. Concentrate on images and things. Complete this sentence with your most interesting comparison: I feel as __________ as a _________.

One of the most revealing comparisons we can make about ourselves is with animals. If you were an animal, what would you be? Cluster the word "animal". Then begin writing in the first person, and be the animnal, drawing on the material from your cluster.

Go to a modern art museum and look at abstract paintings or sculpture. Freewrite about what they help you to recognize in the world your know.

Tackle a Sheep

Think of a character tormented by some kind of problem. One who is afraid of spiders, or one who can't sleep. He was fired from his job. He is a hemophiliac who's just landed a job at a razor factory. Now put them to bed and give them a dream. Don't worry if it's the perfect dream, just give them a dream. Use your own dreams or your own problems as resources. When you've written a page or two, stop. Circle the key moments in the dream and the best details.

Now think of the same character, in the process of overcoming their problem. Revise the dream, accenting parts and adding new information to show their progress.

Weed a Sentence and Make It Bloom

Return to the draft you finished on "Divorcing the Draft", or any of your other drafts that need editing.

Choose a [age and edit it for passive voice, cluttrer, and murky language. Cut at least seven words.

For fun, share your awful rewrites of the sentences in this exercise with a friend. Have him or her try to edit it back down to clarity. See how close he or she comes to the original version.

Spend a minute finding a shorter word or phrase for the following:

- At the present time
- Implement
- Due to the fact that
- He totally lacked the ability to
- Initiate
- In many instances
- Facilitate
- In spite of the fact that
- Individuals
- In a curious manner

No Facial Expressions for a Month, Please

When readers aren't around, writers learn to imagine them. Imagining audiences is one way that writers see beyond their own twitching noses and gain the distance necessary to revise. Here are a few exercises to help connect you with the power of audience.

Write a letter to two very different friends. Write about the same events. Keep both letters and before you mail them, compare. How does your audience affect your voice.

Find an old resume or write a new one for a job you would like to apply for. Take a moment, read over the resume and ask yourself this question: Who am I writing for? Now, just for fun, imagine a new audience: someone you know and love; someone whom you'd tell all the things you didn't include in your job descritpions; someone whom you'll tell the rest of the story.

Freewrite, cluster or brainstorm for five or ten minutes, then compose a new resume out of this new information.

Finding Your Writing Self

Your Inner Teen

You want to create characters that who will appeal to your readership. The following list of questions is designed to invoke the emotions of teenhood. Make notes to yourself while going through the list. You might be surprised by which questions strike you more than others. Don't be concerned if the answers to some of the questions happened during times in your life that fell before or after ages 13-19. Remember, the spirit of youth can move us at any time of life. The important thing is to get a feeling for how that spirit has affected you personally.

1] What is your clearest memory of feeling alienated? Misunderstood? Betrayed?

2] What is the most unfair thing that has happened to you? What did you do?

3] In what way did your upbringing seem utterly different from that of your peers?

4] When have you gone against peer pressure to follow your conscience?

5] How do you react to authority? What's an example of authority being right? Wrong?

6] What has been your moment of greatest rebellion? How about your greatest dream of rebellion?

7] What's the greatest risk you've taken? How did it work out?

8] Have you done something impulsive that had a long-lasting effect on your life?

9] Have you been disbelieved when your were telling the truth? Have you feared the truth enough to lie? Or has someone lied to you about something important?

10] What is the most traumatic historical event you have lived through? How close were you to the actual events of that history?

11] Have you grown apart from a dear friend? If so, was it gradual or sudden?

12] Have you ever been so embarrassed you wanted to sink through the floor?

13] What's the most unconventional thing you've done? The most thoughtless?

14] What's the biggest mistake you've ever made?

15] Have you been in a situation from which there seemed to be no way out? What did you do?

16] When was the loneliest time in your life? How did you deal with it?

17] When did you first fall in love? What happened?

18] Has someone important to you rejected you?

19] Have you ever lost control completely or done something so wild you surprised yourself?

20] Have you laughed so hard you cried? Cried so hard you laughed?

21] Have you ever suddenly changed your appearance dramatically?

22] What has been your most euphoric moment? How did it change you?

23] What have you longed to do but never done?

24] What have you yearned to find but never found?

25] What and whome would you die for?

Teen Voice

After answering the questions, what sort of mood has been invoked? Do you have a sense of a teen voice inside you with something to say? If so, write a paragraph or two in that voice. Do not analyze while writing the paragraph(s).