| Harmonious Confusion
The exercises here are optional writing prompts for times when you feel blocked or would like to try something different. Some may occasionally be assigned in class for points. Most of the first half are fiction-oriented; most of the second half are poetry-oriented. The ideas are mainly original, though a few are adaptations. (Sources are available upon request.)
The Luminous Object Take a look at some everyday object--an ironing board, radio, tennis shoe--and start writing. Associate spontaneously from the object, drawing whatever connections you wish and moving on to any other subject you care to. What does this object remind you of? How would such an object appear to a visitor from outer space? In what way does it embody your worst fears or fantasies? Don't be staid, boring, or predictable. Try some "leaping" comparisons, such as the ones Pablo Neruda draws in his odes. (He compares his socks to wildly disparate things, such as sharks and firemen, for instance.) Invent some figures of speech. End up someplace other than where you started. Have fun. Don't edit yourself. Just write. The Thing Itself As an alternative to "The Luminous Object" above, try writing about an object without venturing beyond that item as your subject. Describe it with as much specific, intense, concrete detail as possible, using all of your senses. Don't explain, ruminate, or deviate . Simply make the object vivid and present through language, respecting its thingness. Pulling Over for a Siren Compose a vignette in which you describe a lake, a tree, or a living room from the perspective of one of the following people: a) Someone who has just committed a violent crime. Describe the lake or tree or room almost exclusively in concrete language; do not allow the narrator to talk about how he or she feels, or what he or she thinks about the scene. And: DO NOT MENTION THE BAD NEWS, THE CRIME, OR THE INFIDELITY. Slamdancing through Winter Fold a piece of paper lengthwise. On the left side, make a list of any ten nouns. Consider names of animals, places, household items, and people, as well as words signifying emotions or concepts. (I find abstract nouns--hope, grief, luck--most interesting for this exercise.) Now turn the page over to the right side. Write down fifteen specific verbs associated with some occupation: carpenter, cook, dancer, doctor. Or try fifteen verbs having to do with the weather, an animal, or a river. Open the page, and experiment now with interesting sentences by making unlikely noun-verb connections. (You may need to change the tense or number of some of the verbs.) Feel free to extend the sentences if you wish, or to recombine some words. DO NOT construct obvious or necessarily rational combinations; try for strange and surprising ones. Finally, you might compose these unusual sentences into a surreal poem or short prose work, or use them to prompt something new. What a Character (I suspect most fiction writers discover their characters as they write their stories, and that their characters may even remain somewhat mysterious to their authors, but the following, more calculated approach might be of some help regardless, or if you feel stuck.) To improve a figure in one of your stories, or to help you get started on a story, write an elaborate character sketch in which you answer the following questions. Your answers should be well-developed, believable, and consistent.
What a Character (Part II) Keeping in mind Part I above, choose one of the tasks below and write out a detailed response.
Swamp Buggy Spectacular Get together with one or more people and decide who will begin writing. That person should sketch out the exposition for a short story, then pass it on to the next person, who should then continue to develop the piece. (Try to develop believable, interesting characters, and to provide some good complications and hooks in the plot.) Pass the story around several times, or until someone determines that the story is finished. The group can then discuss the results, and/or each person can revise the story as desired.
The Most Amazing Thing Was The Cheese Write a story whose first line is: "The most amazing thing was the cheese."
Stuff
Komputer Kicks Here are some exercises to try with a computer word processing program: a) Try freewriting WITH YOUR MONITOR OFF. Type as long as you can in one sitting, allowing your mind to wander freely. If you become engaged with one subject, image, or pattern, go ahead and go with it. After you've written as much as you can, turn your monitor back on and read the results. You might then continue to develop and revise the whole thing, or part of it. Or you may find, in the random flow of relatively unfruitful writing, the germ of an idea you can then develop separately. b) Type what you think will be the final line for a poem at the top of your screen. Then type the second-to-last line, but enter it above the first one you typed. Continue to add lines this way until the line first entered has been pushed all the way to the bottom of your screen. (Don't invent your poem beforehand; you want to actually construct a new poem in this fashion.) c) Take a "finished" poem or story and rearrange its parts. You might highlight/select a paragraph in a story and move it to a different position, or delete several paragraphs randomly to see what's lost or possibly gained through the resulting compression. Or, if you like, you could take a free verse poem and break its stanzas differently. What happens when a poem written in a long block or single stanza is broken into two-line stanzas? Into three-line stanzas? Does a different order enliven the piece, or bring into the foreground buried aspects of the work? Does the new arrangement help you see possibilities for revision, or perhaps a whole new poem or story? Continue to experiment with text manipulation; try out any reorderings or other ideas that you wish. Prose and Cons Go find stories by three modern or contemporary fiction writers and write a passage of prose imitating each one. (You might consider choosing three of the following writers: Ernest Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzerald, William Faulkner, Angela Carter, J.P Donleavy, Don Delillo, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Minot.) Pay close attention to sentence length, sentence structure, diction, rhythm, and tone. How would you describe each writer's style? Paws Imagine that you're a particular animal--giraffe, cat, hummingbird, mole. Taking the perspective of this creature, and assuming that it is capable of writing, compose a short story in which you describe the world around you. Since animals cannot reflect or explain, you will be experiencing your environment in an entirely sensory way, and your writing should therefore be full of striking physical detail and metaphor. (For instance, from the point of view of a deer, a hunter's rifle would be something like, as one student put it, "a branch that barks.") One possibility is to locate yourself in a particular place, such as a classroom, rooftop, lakeside, or city street, and focus your description on that place. Or you might imagine that you have just awakened in your bedroom on a typical Monday morning, only to find that you've turned into some animal. (This idea of course is from Kafka.) Use a good deal of specific, concrete, descriptive detail. Skipping Stones and Digging Up Bones "Ut picyura poesis." ("As in painting, so in poetry." ) —Horace. Find an art piece which has significance for you, or simply piques your interest somehow, and write a poem or story based on it. This might be a personal item, say a photograph of your family or a drawing you did as a child, or it might be an established art work. You might even use some sort of "found" art, such as a sketch you came across on a wall, or a photograph discovered in some old book. Describe the item as accurately as possible, but feel free also to digress and invent however you wish. Avoid pat, obvious statements; discover or happen onto connections and associations as you write. Tenure Recall the ranking of songs we did in class recently, and the criteria you used to judge the pieces you heard. What are your personal criteria for any kind of art, and especially for fiction? What kind of reading experience, for you, is "good"? What has gone wrong with pieces that you dislike? Write up a prose paragraph in which you offer tips to a young writer for writing a good story. Be specific, clear, and thorough. And be careful; this person is an intensely serious student who lives to write and who hangs on your every word. Take Me To The River. Drop Me in the Water. My friend, it is the poet's task --Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger, Act III, sc.2 Though everyone dreams at night, much of that activity is lost as soon as we wake, or shortly after. You can preserve your dream images, however, and make some interesting discoveries as well by keeping a dream notebook or journal. To begin such a journal, keep pen and paper near your bed and, immediately upon waking, whether in the morning or in the middle of the night, begin describing what you dreamed. It's crucial to begin writing as soon as you've opened your eyes, since any visual, audio, or tactile stimuli will dilute or cause you to forget dream images. (Hard-core dream recorders keep their notebooks right by their bedsides, and actually begin writing before they've opened their eyes!) Setting an alarm for the middle of the night is also helpful, since you will often be forced awake while in a dream phase of your sleep. Describe in detail everything you can remember; if you get stuck, go back and add more detail to what you've already written. The careful recollection of any single image from the dream may help you to remember more. Tracks Choose one short story from our anthology (preferably one you find a bit puzzling or difficult or even dull), and simply type or write out the whole piece exactly as it is. OR choose four poems and copy them out just as you find them. Pay attention, as you write, to that writer's diction, sentence style, phrasing. At the end of your work, write a brief paragraph explaining with some detail what you observed. (It's hard to know the benefits of this exercise without actually doing it.) There's Always Work at the Post Office Make a list of people who are (or have been) important to you, people for whom you have strong feelings or who have left you with vivid memories, good or bad. Select one of the most interesting from your list, then write three versions of an epistolary poem or story addressed to that person. For each version, heed the following: Version one: this will be read by yourself and the addressee only. No one else will ever see it. Version two: this will be intercepted by an editor, who will then publish it in a literary anthology. It will be read by thousands. Version three: this one will never get mailed at all. Address it to the person in question, but write it mainly for yourself. You alone will see it. Room--Of One's Own When you get to your chosen place, start writing. Intelligence Test (borrowed and adapted from Alberta Turner, I think) Answer the following questions from a hypothetical intelligence test by picking out the most wrong answers and/or the ones you wish were true. Make these answers into a prose piece or poem. Play around; put together something unlike anything you done before. 1) What can you catch on your tongue? a. memories 2) What can you do with an ax? a. take out a car loan 3) What can be safely carried in a quart buckets? a. lucky accidents 4) Which of the following would you eat? a. an ad for Junior Mints 5) What does a screwdriver do? a. molest paperclips 6) What could you probably do if you had a long tail? a. drape it over your arm 7) What would you most likely try to do if you shrank to the size of a pea? a. wash your feet 8) What CAN'T you do with an egg? a. send it to a private school
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Write a story which takes place in a single location, has almost no action, and which involves, at most, four characters. You might position your characters around a table, in a bed, in two chairs, at a window etc. These characters should do almost nothing but talk with one another throughout the length of the story, and each should be distinct from the others in interesting ways. If you like, you might first reflect on opposite tendencies or personalities within yourself, and let each character embody those contraries. Or you can let the characters develop as you like, and perhaps discover in the making how they in some way reflect contrasting quirks and complexities. What difficulties are faced by a writer in pacing such a story? How does the spareness of such a setting affect the other elements of the story? How does a writer build suspense or develop scenes with such minimal elements? The Child is Father to the Man Think back to your childhood and recall some obect you were fond of or intrigued by: some new shoes, your mother's jewelry, a ferris wheel, an abandoned house, a neighbor's hostile cat, your father's buzzsaw, etc. etc. Now write a short prose piece or poem about this object from the perspective of yourself when you were a child. Describe and reflect upon the object just as you did years before, and try not to let your adult perceptions, inhibitions and embarrassments intrude. Allow yourself to say odd, even nonsensical things. AVOID CUTENESS AND CLICHE COMMENTS OR COMPARISONS. Low-Fat Fiction Take one of your already completed stories and shorten it by half. Fiction on Steroids Take one of your already completed stories and develop it to three times its original length. 1) Make a list of people you strongly dislike, and are morally or physically repelled by. These can be people you personally know very well, or mere acquaintances. 2) Choose one person from your list, and, in a paragraph, describe him or her in great detail: physical appearance, clothing, mannerisms, self-view, other-view, values, beliefs, history, character, personality. Be concrete and specific. 3) Now do one of the following:
Hyperactive Explore some hypertext literary sites and works on the Web (CLICK HERE). Read some hypertext stories and poems, and explore around also for theory about, and criticism of, such works. Then write your own hypertext poem or story, using resources unique to electronic environments (especially hypertext links, though you might also explore use of moving text, graphics, and sound). Try any and all programs, software, or skills you might have, including ability to use straight HTML. How does this experience compare to "flatlander" writing? What advantages and disadvantages do you find in writing such a piece? Barnsteaming and Bearstewing Sit in a comfortable place and note the time. Begin writing whatever comes to mind, and continue without stopping for 5 minutes. It's important that you NOT stop to think; you should write continuously, even if what goes onto the paper is nonsensical or trite. Don't cross out or erase, and don't worry about mechanics. Just keep your pen in motion. At the end of the timed period you can stop, and you might then want to reflect on what you've written. Does any particular subject or image seem to recur? Anything odd or surprising? Pick one item--a subject or image--from your passage, and start writing once more with that item as your focus again for 5 minutes, and again WITHOUT PAUSING TO THINK. At the end of the second 5 minutes, stop and again examine the results. Once more pick an item from what you've just written, and freewrite about it for 5 minutes. At the end of this third period, read over your results carefully, looking for patterns, semi-conscious perceptions, interesting leaps, "nonsensical sense," small discoveries. Civil Liberties Go to a local fiction or poetry reading. Check The Spectrum, Shining Times, High Plains Reader, KDSU, and fliers all over campus for literary events at school or in town. Make contact with a writer--young, old, published or otherwise. Visit the new writer's corner at the Plains Art Museum. Invite someone in our class to join you for a drink or cup of coffee. Call someone in the MFA program at Moorhead State. Organize a reading in your home town. Start a reading group or an informal writing workshop. Get up at a poetry slam or open mike and read a couple pieces you've written. Order information about writer's retreats and conferences. Become afflicted with reverse agoraphobia.
"Out of three or four in a room/One is always standing by the window" 1) Sit before a window. 2) Look carefully at everything in view. 3) Write a poem about what you see. My Love is Like a Doornail Make a list of worn-out, cliche comparisons: "my love is like a rose," "dead as a doornail," "white as snow," "cold as ice," "the sands of time," "happy as a lark," "old as the hills," etc. Include at least fifteen. You might begin your list at the beginning of the semester, and add to it whenever you hear such cliches in your daily life. After you've made your list, write a short prose piece in which you regroup the items of comparison: "happy as ice," "cold as a rose," "blue as time." Jumble the worn-out expressions, feeling free to sometimes make little sense. Write simply for the pleasure of making the comparisons fresh. Eating Poetry Considering Kinnel's "Blackberry Eating," write a paragraph or poem about some single, rich physical experience, using language to strongly suggest the actions and sensations of that experience. Or, after looking at Roethke's "Root Celler," try your hand instead at a "cold," "hot," "scratchy," "wet,' or "smooth" poems. Choose one sensation and make your language mimic it through sound. buh-DUM, buh-DUM buh-DUM buh-DUM buh-DUM Write a full page of lines, double-spaced, in iambic pentameter. These lines do not necessarily need to connect in meaning to one another, nor do they necessarily need to make sense in and of themselves. Simply practice the iambic pattern (five iambs per line). When you're done, try writing a real poem in iambic pentameter. (Ok-- you wonder how you ought to start? Lound and Sanguage Write a paragraph or poem full of nonesense words or portmanteau words, as in "Jabberwocky" or "A Nosty Fright." Experiment with the sheer sound of words, feeling free to be playful, extravagant, illogical. Consider transposing letters in word groups, combining words to form new ones, or distorting words slightly to form interesting, intentional malapropisms. Oral Fixation One way to sharpen your attention to detail, sound, and pattern in a poem is to memorize it. As with the "Tracks" idea above, you can't really know the benefit of this exercise without just doing it. For notebook credit then, select a poem at least fifteen lines long from our text, memorize it, and then recite it aloud to the class. (Reciting aloud also has its benefits.) Free Verse Lineation The line breaks in each of the following free verse poems have been removed, and each poem written out as a prose paragraph. Without changing any of the poems' wording or punctuation, reinsert the line breaks yourself, experimenting with different arrangements. Try each one first with all short lines, then with all long lines, for instance. Try end-stopped as well as enjambed lines, or try breaking the lines in places where, in reading the poem aloud, you would naturally stop to take a breath. Provide breaks which help reinforce or mirror the meaning of the lines themselves, or which otherwise contribute to the poem's feeling or sense. See if you can adhere consistently, within each poem, to a single principle of lineation, whether rhythmic, syntactic, syllabic, visual, or otherwise--though you might even try breaking the lines completely at random, just to see what the result will be. Check with me in class for copies of the original poems--to see how the authors themselves broke their lines. Poet #1: Love Poem There is always something to be made of pain. Your mother knits. She turns out scarves in every shade of red. They were for Christmas, and they kept you warm while she married over and over, taking you along. How could it work, when all those years she stored her widowed heart as though the dead come back. Now wonder you are the way you are, afraid of blood, your women like one brick wall after another. The Mirror Watching you in the mirror I wonder what it is like to be so beautiful and why you do not love but cut yourself, shaving like a blind man. I think you let me stare so you can turn against yourself with greater violence, needing to show me how you scrape the flesh away scornfully and without hesitation until I see you correctly, as a man bleeding, not the reflection I desire.
Poet #2: Across Kansas My family slept those level miles but like a bell rung deep till dawn I drove down an aisle of sound, nothing real but in the bell, past the town where I born. Once you cross a land like that you own your face more: what the light struck told a self; every rock denied all the rest of the world. We stopped at Sharon Springs and ate--My state still dark, my dream too long to tell. Answerers There are songs too wide for sound. There are quiet places where something stopped a long time ago and the days began to open their mouths toward nothing but the sky. We live in place of the many who stir only if we listen, only because the living live and call out. I am ready as all of us are who wake at night: we become rooms for whatever almost is. It speaks in us, trying. And even if only by a note like this, we answer.
Choose one of your already "completed" poems and, knowing that it will still be there when you've finished this exercise, plough under the language and fill the lines back in with whatever odd, zaney, surprising, arbitrary diction that comes to mind. With the help of a thesaurus, revise the diction (any or all of the main nouns, verbs and adjectives) to make it new and more vivid or imaginative. You might arbitrarily choose a single page from a thesaurus, and force yourself to use words only from that page, even if they make little, at times, logical sense. Alternately, you might fill in the poem with diction which is new but not entirely random: in place of words denoting or connoting happiness, pleasure or peace, for instance, you might fill in words having to do consistently with depression, pain, or violence. You don't necessarily have to keep this revised version of the poem. This and That Write a poem about how your mother and father met. This and That (II) Write a poem about chlorophyll. This and That (III) Write a poem about the North Dakota sky. This and That (IV) Write a poem about the Eleusinian Mysteries. My Friend, A Word Read Tony Hoagland's poem, "Dickhead." Then: 1) Make a list of your favorite words, or of special idiomatic expressions you find yourself using frequently, or of expressions which irritate you or amuse you. 2) Pick one. 3) Write a poem about that word. "As long as there is desire, we will not be safe." 1) Make a list of politically incorrect words, expressions, and actions. 2) Read Tony Hoagland's poem "Adam and Eve." 3) Write a poem about some politically incorrect word, expression or action. S/He Read Tony Hoagland's "The Replacement." Then: Rewrite the poem. Keep the first stanza as-is, but change the word "brother" (line 2) to "sister." Change also "with the brain of a man" (line 3) to "with the brain of a woman." Rewrite the remainder of the poem as you believe is appropriate, given the new beginning. Concrete and Visual Poetry Like oral verse, visual poetry has also been around since antiquity. Early in the 20th century, Brazilian "concretists" gave the genre a big kick, and it is now flourishing in the form of electronic, new media poetry-art. The resources of digital media are of course really great for any kind of visual art, and new media poets are now experimenting with poems that include animation, audio, and interactivity with the reader. 1) Take an already completed poem and, using Word or some other application, alter its font. Try applying one particular font to the whole piece, and try also varying fonts throughout the piece. Save each version, and read each carefully to see what effects are achieved by altering your work visually in this way.
Consider also animating parts of the piece in Flash.
Mark Strand Apparently Did This Once 1) Write a poem in which all the lines are radically different lengths. 2) Write another poem in which all the lines are exactly the same length. And Now These Messages Select at random a number of magazine advertisements and study the sound patterns you find there: rhyme, near-rhyme, alliteration, assonance. How do the sounds of the ad's language mimic or suggest its subject matter? How do they earn your attention? How do they make you feel? Now scan the ad's metrics: do you find any regular or near-regular pattern of stresses? Try to analyze each caption thoroughly, with an ear to intended effects, as well as to connotative and associational meanings. Finally, how do the sounds help you remember the ad—even though you may not want to? A Dumb Poem Lobbing Crumbs and Cream (like Bombs, Only Numb; like Combs, only Bored) at a Tomb Write a poem as full of rhyme as possible. Use true rhyme, identical rhyme, light rhyme, slant rhyme, sight rhyme, masculine rhyme, feminine rhyme, linked rhyme, analyzed rhyme, echo rhyme, and rhyme riche. Do not, however, use end rhyme. Found Poem Write a "found" poem.
Put together a poem using Leevi Lehto's engine. Go here: http://www.leevilehto.net/google/google.asp
More play with Google. Go here: http://googlism.com/
Convert any web page text into a different dialect ("Redneck," "Jive," "Swedish Chef," "Cockney," "Moron," etc. Frequently lame, silly, or just plain idiotic, but good for an occasional giggle. Go here: http://rinkworks.com/dialect/ Hint: try typing in (or copying and pasting) the URL for our Course Information page! Course Info URL: http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/cinichol/CreativeWriting/CourseInfo.htm
Choose a poem from our course readings which confuses you, then respond to the following: 1) Read through the poem again. Spend five to ten minutes freewriting about it--your immediate thoughts and feelings. Don't stop, don't reread what you've written, don't edit. Just write. 2) Write down a single word representing the poem. 3) Who seems to be the speaker of the poem? Where is it set? 4) Pretend you are the poet. Explain why you wrote this poem. 5) Talk to the writer. Ask him or her whatever questions you have. Try general as well as very specific questions, and consider anything and everything about the poem. 6) Again pretend that you are the poet: answer the questions you asked in number 5. 7) Look at the poem's title. How might it help you understand the poem? Invent two or three alternative titles. 8) Read the poem aloud, and have someone read it aloud to you. 9) What line or phrase seems to you most striking and memorable? 10) Put the poem away and return to it in two weeks. Read it again carefully. Put it away again for another couple months, and then read it again. Stash it for a year, and then pull it out and read it. Stick it in a drawer until 2009; take it out and read it. Put in under your mattress until the day you lose your hearing; pull the poem out and read it again. While lying in your grave, recite it to the angels. A Long Poem About Something Really Little Write a long poem about something really little. Jambalya Poem (A Version of "The Exquisite Corpse") Join three or more people and pass around four slips of paper for each person. Everyone should then write a noun on his or her first slip of paper, a verb or verb phrase on the second slip, a simile on the third, and a prepositional or participle phrase on the fourth--anything that comes immediately to mind. Examples: Concrete or abstract nouns: "Truck," "Tiger," "Grief," "Shoelace," "Euphoria," "Sandwich," "Honor" Verbs: "remember," "circumnavigate," "chatter," "criss-cross," "fumble," "boil," "swelter" Participle phrases: "shoveling the manure," "rumpling the sheet," "slicing a peach," "riding a wave" Prepositional phrases: "in the pocket," "around the corner," "about a war," "for a cause," "under the earth" Similes: "like sorrow," "like a cat," "like footsteps," "like dust" Someone should next put all of the slips in a hat, mix them up, and draw them out one by one, arranging them into complete sentences (and perhaps then into stanzas) as they are removed. You can make slight grammatical changes to help the sentences cohere, adding conjunctions and articles, changing verb forms etc.--but do NOT force the content of the sentences to be logical or pat. Look for unusual connections, fresh comparisons, imaginative possibilities, obsessions held in common as well as those uniquely yours. Love Poem Write a love poem. Prose Poem Write a prose poem. Elegy Write an elegy. Do It Your Way Re-read the introduction to this site, then come up with your own "Harmonious Confusion" exercise, writing out a detailed paragraph of background and instructions. When you've finished, go ahead and actually follow the instructions yourself. I.e., complete the exercise you just invented.
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