This is totally stolen, so my apologies to Robin Morrissey, a friend of mine who used this exercise for much more serious writing purposes.
Choose a word. Usually a noun works best. Do you have it?
Ok, now write a story titled “My Autobiography as a [your word here]”. It’s like mad libs for adults.
Robin had her class make a list of American icons, and her class wound up writing their autobiographies as apple pie, and they told of the searing pain of slicing, the delicious warmth of the baking process, and the phantom pains of longing for their missing pieces. Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is the autobiography of Geryon, a little known red monster killed by Hercules as one of his labors.
If you’re stuck in NaNoWriMo, maybe this will help you get started. Let me know how things turn out!
I know, I know. It’s Saturday.
It’s been said that there are only two stories in the world: the hero’s journey and the stranger coming to town. Of course, the stranger story is just the hero story told from another perspective. I’m not sure I buy it. Although many stories have these basic patterns, sometimes the main story is boy meets girl or child/oppressed person overthrows authority.
Anyway.
For today, tell the stranger story from either perspective. If you’re looking at it from the visitor’s perspective, look at travel guides & pictures, listen to music, and eat the food of your strange land to get a feel for it. If you’re telling the story from another perspective, first take a really clear look at your community. How would you describe it to someone else? Now, how would you describe the opposite? How would your community react if that opposite showed up on its doorsteps and tried to carry off your favorite daughter?
Happy writing!
One word...um, acronym: NaNoWriMo.
While you’re busy worry about if that last semi-colon was placed, Danielle Steele and her heirs are making a fortune. Tell you what. Just write 50,000 words in November and worry about if it’s good after the fact. If it’s half bad, you’ve still got 50 pages that you can keep. Last year, when I tried to write a novel, I wound up with 3 short stories and 4 poems. That’s not so bad. If you can’t do it this month, no worries. There are more similar challenges than there are months of the year to do them in. For a list of quantity writing challenges and more information, visit the site.
The Chicago liaison has posted some NaNo related events for those of you who need an extra kick in the pants:
“Here are some other exciting things you can look forward to this month: the statewide write-in on 11/22; the CTA write-in (date TBD - it will either be Sunday 11/9 or 11/16); the Open Books Virtual Book Drive (see the front page of the ChiWriMo site beginning 11/1 for more details!); prizes for attending official ChiWriMo write-in nights at Open Books; and much more!”
Some of my students told me that a man riding a bus through Canada inexplicably turned to his seatmate, stabbed him repeatedly, and then decapitated him and started cutting him up. He later displayed the head to the other passengers who had since fled and trapped him in the bus. You can’t make this stuff up, folks.
Out here in the world of the sane, we do better things with our murderous thoughts, such as writing them really small in thousands of identical journals. For today’s story starter, access your craziness. Look back at old journals, or just consider what your thoughts when that guy in traffic cut you off. I think most of us have a wealth of crazy, but if you can’t, try to figure out this guy. He was apparently calm throughout the whole thing, as it though it was the most normal thing in the world.
When you’re done, voila! Serial killer character profile for your murder mystery, ready to go.
Make sure you clearly label this thing a writing exercise. I’d hate to have the FBI investigate you (or me).
Last week, I asked you to write out your weird fantasy life, accessing an alternative universe where you are in control. Today’s prompt is similar. Instead of asking you to completely fabricate an unlikely situation, I’d like you to imagine a point of divergence from something that actually happened.
I woke up late this morning, so I wound up on the train with those special high school students who shout at each other across the aisles. The idea of sitting next to one’s conversation partner has apparently escaped them, yet they seem annoyed when someone takes a seat being used by their book-bag or feet. I sat next to the least threatening of them and shut my eyes, letting their swirling chaos assault my ears. Finally, they exited, and I was relived to say the least. Civilization would resume.
I must have forgotten where I was. When the doors opened at Fullerton, an obviously blind man entered, white cane a-tappin’, and he headed directly for the one open seat on the train, which was a priority seat. Oh good, I thought, I don’t have to get up. Turns out I did though. Some able-bodied woman, or girl I should say based on her behavior, slid into the seat, opened her Red Eye and didn’t even bother to look guilty. The blind man looked confused. Wasn’t there just a seat there, and now there’s a person? Are my spidey-sense off? So I got up, and a gentleman in the true sense of the word boxed out other would be seat usurpers. I was so happy with the gentleman’s behavior that I forgot about Ms. Red Eye. Oh, the withering stare I should have given her! The lecture about who among us was really blind! I certainly would have told her, if I was one of those types that, you know, confronted people. Instead I blog about them. Such nerve!
We’ve all had these experiences that, if we had our druthers, we’d do over, preferably with a script and ample rehearsal time. So this time, instead of starting with a fantasy and working out what would really happen, you’re starting with a real, lived experience. That’s a story in and of itself. The fiction comes in when you make happen what should have happened, or what might have if you’d had the courage to sauce things up.
Keep the sauce on the paper, and keep writing!
