Tuesday, April 19th 500 words min

500 word minimum

Radical Revision
Select a piece of writing from your journal, blog or finished piece – something that you are not afraid to rework, something you are not committed to.

You are going to take risks with this piece. Take the piece as far as you can.

Pick one of the following:

Voice/Tone Change

double voice, multiple voice, change from first to third or to second. write as a character. Change tone from serious to comic or vice versa. Change ethnicity. change perspective. use stream-of-consciousness.

Genre change

non-fiction to poem to song to ad campaign, fable, letter, sermon, fairy tale, recipe, prayer, cartoon,

Audience Change
adult to child to business to educated to immigrant

Time Change
future, flashbacks, continuous present, parallel times, simultaneity, tell backwards, different era or point of time,

Thursday,april 14

[ Reminder: meet in the forum for Cultural Fair speaker. ]

Record as accurately as possible a two-three minute conversation among two or more people.

For Thursday, April 7th

500 words min.

The essence of drama is conflict—forces of one sort or another at odds in one way or another. In this exercise I want you to focus on the notion that the essence of conflict is power. Power as in….

Someone has authority over someone else
Someone challenges the authority of someone else
An institution or a group of people control an individual’s behavior
An individual controls the behavior of a group of people or an institution
Someone wants something from someone else
Someone uses the threat of physical force to manipulate someone else
Someone uses information or money to try to control someone else

Using one of the above—or something similar—explore the notion of power as leading to conflict. Perhaps put the characters from your short story into a situation where there is a power differential. See what comes up.

Thursday March 31

Complete the exercise on page 138, although it must be in prose, not in poetry.

For Thursday March 17th

First, post your short short story and include the statistic from Harper's Index.

Second, write the unknown. (250-500 words)

For this exercise, write the beginning of a story that contains an unknown, something you wonder about in a story. Certain elements in narrative texts open up enigmans--questions, or riddles, or just things that you wonder about in your reading--and these enigmas are one source of pleasure in reading. They are what engage us, take us up. But the pleasure lies not so much in the enigma itself, but in the variety and complexity of ways the text delays answering its questions. Pleasure springs from the delay itself, the putting off of closure, what remains open. Suspense.

On the top of a volcano you find a rock with some kind of image etched into it. What does it mean?
Your character coughs, but the sound is like something you have never heard before.
You are digging in your garden and you uncover--what, a small stone statue of a horse? someone's ring? the bone of a small animal?

Invent ways to put off discovering what you seek to know.

Fiction is almost always indirect. Write away from the story, not toward it. Look for satisfying enigmas in the drafts of stories. Put off the end as long as you can.

Inches by which the Eiffel Tower shrinks each winter: 6

To Alex, it felt like a sure thing. They had been seeing each other for a couple of months. They both liked acid jazz and sushi in mega doses. She liked his friends. He approved of her parents. A weekend getaway seemed natural. Paris was expensive, but not bad.

The hotel had an outside pool, heated. They were alone. This close to Christmas, very few people were using the pool. She looked spectacular in a bikini, snow frosting her hair. A king-sized bed, chocolate on the pillow, awaited their return. Alex chased her into the women’s changing room, both of them shrieking as the icy air hit their bodies.

“Jesus, its cold” he said.

“Quick,” she said. “Change and get upstairs.” Alex stripped off his trunks. A glance down and she excused herself—then and for the rest of the trip.

Later he read that the Eiffel Tower shrinks six inches during winter.

Tuesday, March 15 500 words min

Put two characters of your story in a situation in which they must say less or other than they mean. Reveal the protagonist's true feelings through thoughts, and the other character's true feelings through gesture, expression or other external signs.

Remember that point of view in such a scenario must either be 1st person or third person limited. You are not allowed to go into the head of the second person. The added challenge here is that dialogue of both characters will mean something more, less or other than what they say. This exercise will get you to focus on elements of character and plot that are not direct recountings of what is happening.

March 3rd: Sonnet Exercise

Take your paragraphs about a sonnet topic and narrow them down into 14 lines of 10 syllables each. Don't worry about meter or rhyme at this point.