What do a toaster, a Komodo dragon and a tea kettle have in common?

They are all subjects of the pieces that resulted from this week’s writing exercises.

The Exercises:

• My Pet by Alison Lurie
• Surrealism Exercise, or Thinking Outside the Box by Laurie Foos
• Birth of a Story in an Hour or Less by Crystal Wilkinson

For My Pet I wrote a passage from the POV of one of my characters who happens to have a pet Komodo dragon.  For Surrealism I used the exercise’s formula and made the prompt:  “After a night of cramming, she discovered that her hand had grown a tea kettle.”  For Birth of a Story, I used two of my characters, one of whom was reincarnated as a toaster.

 The Results:



Overall, not so good.  For starters, I only got through three exercises this week, rather than my target of seven.  The bigger disappointment, though, was that of the three exercises, only one actually felt like it sparked something and it was the one where I didn’t try to use characters from my current project.

Usually I like using the “two birds, one stone” method with writing exercises.  I use them to warm up, but I tend to tweak the prompt or assignment so that it allows me to use characters I’m already writing about.  Usually this works.  In fact, a lot of times I get material out of these exercises that I can later add to the book in some way.  At the very least, though, these exercises usually end up helping me understand my characters better.  This week, that totally didn’t happen.

In the end, My Pet and Birth of a Story will have to get do-overs so they don’t count toward the tally.  I better get my act together because the days are ticking away.

iggi says…

The Exercises:

• Wedding Pictures by Jayne Anne Phillips
• Through the Senses by Robert Olen Butler

 The Results:


Wedding Pcitures
I enjoyed the Wedding Pictures exercise, because it was fairly free-form and allowed me the freedom to take the writing in the direction I wanted.  The picture I used for the exercise was the one on the right.

What drew me to this picture is how odd the couple looks.  She looks like she’s thinking “it’s about time I’m getting married” while he looks terrified, like he’s going to his own funeral.  Also, I don’t know if it’s the unflattering dress, but the bride looks several years older than the groom, which for the time period seems a bit backwards.  This made me think that maybe this marriage is not as free-willed as one would like to imagine.  Notice how deftly the bouquet covers and hides her midsection.  Perhaps some premarital indiscretion makes this the Victorian equivalent of a shot-gun wedding?  You tell me.

iggi says…

Through the Senses
This exercise made me want to scream.  I’m just going to say it: I hate guided writing exercises.  Anyone who knows me will agree when I say that I don’t respond well to orders.  Being coaxed or cajoled… I can live with that.   But taking orders?  No way.

All right, maybe I’m going a little overboard, but this exercise really did feel like it was telling me exactly what to write and how to write it.  And I didn’t get that flash of discovery halfway through the way I usually feel when I do a writing exercise.  It’s that a-ha moment when I finally discover what it was I had to write about and the piece suddenly comes together.  I don’t know if it was the step-by-step format or the way each step spelled out exactly what I was supposed to write, but I found this exercise utterly unhelpful.

Also, telling a writer who hates following orders “Don’t Read Ahead” is pretty much as useless as telling Pandora not to open the box.  I was pretty good, actually.  I got to step 6 out of 7 without reading ahead, but then I caved and did so anyway.  Frankly, I didn’t find the “surprise” of the next step all that surprising anyway so I’m not quite sure why Butler insists that students do each step without reading ahead.

For the first set of Writing Challenges, I will be taking exercises from the book Now Write! edited by Sherry Ellis.  This book has eighty-six exercises, each by a different author.

The Plan: to do as many of these exercises as I can each week and to report back every Wednesday with the results.

The Goal: to finish all eighty-six exercises in the next eighty-six days, which means I’ll be done with Now Write! on July 2nd.

I don’t care if you like poetry or not; if you’re a writer, you must read this book. I can tell what you’re thinking just from looking at the title. “This must be one of those warm-and-fuzzy books,” you say. I say sure, it’s like a warm cup of tea you snuggle up with on a snowy day, but we’re talking some serious tea here. Something super-caffeinated, like mate herb. This isn’t just a “get in touch with your inner-artist-child” sort of book. This book means business.

Ordinary Genius is a combination of analysis and craft. Unlike most books about writing, where you have to work your way in small chunks and do each exercise, you could read this book through to the end as though it were a novel.

Addonizio’s approach has changed how I look at poetry. I used to have a strong distaste for poetry. I think the reason was that while good poetry reverberates in the soul, bad poetry is just atrocious.

After all, many people think
if you stick a few line breaks into
prose, it turns into poetry
like magic.

At the same time, though, I have always had a tremendous respect for anyone who attempts this genre, since I find it so challenging. This book breaks poetry down to the building blocks, helping me understand what makes one poem sing and another fall flat. Addonizio gives micro-assignments that serve almost more like meditations than poetry exercises. This book is about doing an honest day’s writing, about doing the work.

At the same time, though, Addonizio doesn’t guilt her readers into writing (as some writing books tend to do). She doesn’t give word minimums or time requirements. The book is approachable. Friendly. It makes you want to wake up and write every day without telling you that you must.

In the end, Ordinary Genius has opened my eyes to the gracefulness of language,the beauty of gesture. Thanks to this little book, I have fallen in love with language all over again.