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IMAGINATIVE WRITING, 2/e
CONTENTS
Preface
to the instructor
Invitation
to the writer
You...
...and writing...
...and reading...
...and this book...
...and your journal...
...and your workshop
1. IMAGE
Image and Imagination
Concrete, Significant Details
Figures of Speech
READINGS
Creative Nonfiction:
"The Giant Water Bug" Annie Dillard
"The Ring of Time" E.B White
Fiction:
"It's Water, It's Not Going to Kill You" Heather Sellers
Poems:
"The Hawk in the Rain" Ted Hughes
"Snow Day" Billy Collins
"Facing It" Yusef Komunyakaa
"How to Use This Body" David Kirby
"Naming of Parts" Henry Reed
Drama:
Her Deer Story Jim Quinn
2. VOICE
Your voice
Persona
Character Voice
Point of View
READINGS
Creative Nonfiction:
"Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self" Alice Walker
"A Note About Allen Tate" Kelly Cherry
Fiction:
"Sitting With the Dead" William Trevor
"The School" Donald Barthelme
Poems:
"Black Hair" Gary Soto
"Ginko Tree" Tom Crawford
"My Uncle Guillermo Speaks at His Own Funeral" Yvonne Sapia
"Kong Looks Back on His Tryout with the Bears" William Trowbridge
"Father" Hilda Raz
"The Language of Bees" Barbara Hamby
Drama:
French Fries Jane Martin
3. CHARACTER
As Desire
As Image
As Voice
As Action
As Thought
As Presented by The Author
As Conflict
Stock and Flat Characters
READINGS
Creative Nonfiction:
"The Inheritance of Tools" Scott Russell Sanders
Fiction:
"Interpreter of Maladies" Jhumpa Lahiri
Poems:
"I Knew a Woman" Theodore Roethke
"Stonecarver" Carole Simmons Oles
"To Aunt Rose" Allan Ginsberg
"One Flesh" Elizabeth Jennings
"Old Men Playing Baseball" B.H. Fairchild
"Life Cycle of Common Man" Howard Nemerov
Drama:
Brother Mary Gallagher
4. SETTING
As the World
As a Camera
As Mood and Symbol
As Action
READINGS
Creative Non-Fiction:
"At the Dam" Joan Didion
"A Wind From the North" Bill Capossere
Fiction:
"Snow" Charles Baxter
Poems:
"At Navajo Monument Valley Tribal School" Sherman Alexie
"Earthmoving Malediction" Heather McHugh
"Trials of a Tourist" Anne Tibble
"Nude Interrogation" Yusef Komunyakaa
Drama:
Fun Howard Korder
5. STORY
As a Journey
As a Power Struggle
As Connection/Disconnection
READINGS
Creative Nonfiction:
"Red Sky in the Morning" Patricia Hampl
Fiction:
"Missing" Robert Olen Butler
"The Story" Amy Bloom
Poems:
"A Story About the Body" Robert Haas
"Columbine High School" Albert Goldbarth
"Short Story" Ellen Bryant Voigt
"Woodchucks" Maxine Kumin
"The Hammock" Li-Young Lee
"Vita Nova" Louise Gl¿ck
Drama:
The Battle of Bull Run Always Makes Me Cry Carole Real
6. DEVELOPMENT AND REVISION
Developing a Draft
Structuring
Research
Revision
Editing
The Workshop
EXAMPLES
First and final drafts of "One Art" Elizabeth Bishop
Notes on "Outer Space" Tom Bligh
Notes on How To Be a (Revising) Poet" Sara Pennington
The Opening of Indian Dancer: A Revision Narrative Janet Burroway
Growing "Four Tangerines" James Kimbrell
7. CREATIVE NONFICTION
<BR><HR><BR>
<TOC>
The Essay and Creative Nonfiction
Memoir and the Personal Essay
Techniques of Creative Nonfiction
Fact and Truth
READINGS
"The Female Body" Margaret Atwood
"Do He Have Your Number, Mr. Jeffrey?" Gayle Pemberton
"Interlude" William Kittredge
"The Knife" Richard Selzer
"Belongings" Susan Lester
Creative Nonfiction Format
8. FICTION
Story and Plot
Scene and Summary
Backstory and Flashback
Text and Subtext
READINGS
"The Diamond Mine" Nadine Gordimer
"Story" Lydia Davis
"Sister Godzilla" Louise Erdrich
"A Clean, Well-lighted Place" Ernest Hemingway
"Bigfoot Stole My Wife" Ron Carlson
Fiction Format
9. POETRY
Free Verse and Formal Verse
Imagery, Connotation, and Metaphor
Density and Intensity
Prosody, Rhythm, and Rhyme
READINGS
"Stillborn" Sylvia Plath
"The Grammar Lesson" Steve Kowit
"The Poet, Trying to Surprise God" Peter Meinke
"Annus Mirabilis" Philip Larkin
"Fathers" Grace Paley
"Black Silhouettes of Shrimpers" Dave Smith
"The Pardon" Richard Wilbur
"On the Difficulty of Drawing Oneself Up" Kay Ryan
"The Language of the Brag" Sharon Olds
"Dream Song 14" John Berryman
Poetry Format
10. DRAMA
The Difference Between Drama and Fiction
Sight: Sets, Action, Costumes, Props
Sound: Nonverbal and Verbal
Some Notes on Screenwriting
READINGS
Duet for Bear and Dog Sybil Rosen
Gas Jos¿ Rivera
Removing the Head Josh Ben Friedman
Eukiah Lanford Wilson
The Philadelphia David Ives
Drama Format
APPENDIX A Collaborative Exercises
APPENDIX B A Basic Prosody
Glossary
Index
Preface to
the Instructor
In the second edition of Imaginative Writing I have tried to refine and focus several features of the book without fundamentally changing its purpose, which is to provide a workable and energizing multi-genre text for basic creative writing courses. Users and reviewers have been generous in their help, and have led me to add exercises in the early chapters that will help students to develop a draft, to add or alter some of the "Try This" exercises and a good many of the readings, to make exercises easier to identify and find in the text, and to expand the glossary. The revision narratives in chapter six on Development and Revision have been significantly expanded; sample formats have been added to each genre chapter; and I have clarified, expanded or simplified instances where reviewers pointed out muddle, sketchiness or the goblins of jargon. The single greatest change in this edition is a shift from a general discussion of "the essay" to a focus on "creative nonfiction," particularly the personal essay and memoir. Although these were discussed in the first edition, many reviewers felt that the essay as such was adequately covered in standard courses, and that students needed a clearer notion of what "creative" or "literary" nonfiction offers in terms of freedom and stricture, demand and possibility.
The core organizing principle of Imaginative Writing remains the same, which is that students in a multi-genre course can benefit from playing with various writing techniques before they settle into a particular form. Much if not most of the advice given to students is relevant to any sort of writing and to most of the genres: the need for significant detail, for example, applies equally to narrative scene, poetic line, and theatrical dialogue; voice is a concept that applies to a character, a narrator, a memoir, or a lyric persona, and so forth. My expectation is that by discussing techniques and offering exercises that allow students to experiment with them before they lock themselves into a formal project, such instruction will prove less threatening and encourage a sense of adventure. Beginning this way will also make it possible to illustrate the extent to which all writing is imaginative (as well as autobiographical), and the fact that different genres share similar sources and build on similar skills.
I have taken fiction and poetry as givens in a multigenre course. I have personally been convinced of drama's usefulness in developing a writer's facility (with characterization, dialogue, plot, pace, symbol). I have also wanted to acknowledge the growing popularity of creative nonfiction, the continuity of imaginative writing with the essay form students have inevitably studied, and the fact that emerging writers may find it easiest to begin with the material of their own lives.
The book is organized on the assumption that a college semester is about fifteen or sixteen weeks long and that one or two weeks are always lost to administration, holidays, exams, and illness, so that material for fourteen weeks is about right. Roughly, the first five weeks are intended to cover five areas of imaginative technique (Image, Voice, Character, Setting, and Story), the sixth the processes of Development and Revision, and two weeks each can then be devoted to Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama.
Each chapter begins with a graphic or photographic image accompanied by a "Warm-up" prompt, which may be assigned in class or as a journal entry or replaced by one of the instructor's invention.
Each of the technique chapters proceeds with a discussion of that technique, including illustrations from more than one genre (some invented and some taken from established writers); contains exercises ("Try This") throughout, linked to particular aspects of the topic; and is followed by complete selections in the various genres. Again, the "Try This" exercises could be used as in-class practice, assigned for journal entries, or left for the students to choose from. I think it's important, at least sometimes, to discuss resulting pieces in class, in order to get students used to a nonjudgmental discussion of roughs and written play. (This neutral way of workshopping is described at the end of the next section, "Invitation to the Writer.") Further comments and exercises among the selections at the end of each chapter link the readings to the techniques discussed and suggest briefly-there are no questions aimed at literary interpretation-how to read the selections for what can be taken away from them and made part of a repertoire of skills. But of course all the selections illustrate many things, and they can be assigned in any order or quantity that suits the individual instructor. The second edition, at the request of several reviewers, also contains development ideas at the end of each technique chapter, to aid those teachers who encourage students to be thinking toward a finished piece.
Chapter Six, Development and Revision, suggests ways to use the material generated in the first five weeks toward the writing of finished pieces, and here too the workshop may prove a positive help to the writer through exploration rather than praise and critique. The "Try This" exercises in this chapter can again be used in class or out, and if it feels right, students can be encouraged to exchange journal pieces and try developing and revising passages not their own. This chapter is followed by some examples, with discussion, of aspects of the rewriting process.
I've envisioned that for each of the final four chapters, dealing with creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and drama, one week will be spent discussing the genre and roughing out a draft, a second workshopping and working at revision. (Instructors will know what is comfortable and doable for their classes; my inclination would be to assign a short story and an essay of about 1500 words each, three poems, and one ten-minute play.) Each of these chapters attempts to outline what is unique and defining about each of the genres, to suggest ways of exploiting the particular nature of that genre, and to help the students use what they have learned in the first six weeks. Each is followed by a sample format for the genre in question.
The exercises in these chapters are designed to promote development of some aspect of the genre under discussion or to aid revision in terms of focus, cutting, attention to language, originality, and so forth. At this point the critical component of the workshop becomes relevant; students will no doubt be ready to talk about not only what sort of thing this piece of work is but whether and where it "works."
The order of presentation is always problematic in a writing text-everything really needs to be said at once-and many instructors will find that they would have chosen a different sequence for the techniques or the genres or both, so I'll say a little about my rationale. When I laid out the plan for the text Writing Fiction many years ago, I had, out of my classroom experience, a strong sense that students focusing on that form needed a sense of its structure and to face the question: what is a story? But for the more playful and process-oriented course for which Imaginative Writing is intended, it seems to me that the core need and the first skill is the one represented by the irreplaceable maxim: show; don't tell. Again and again I have seen an aha! moment in the classroom when a student suddenly grasped the principle of addressing the senses, a technique so simple and yet so elusive. It is also often revelatory that diction and point of view direct meaning, and I have addressed this issue second. From image and voice to character is a logical progression; then to the outside world of setting, and only then to a consideration of what it means to tell a story, whether in memoir, poetic, fictional, or dramatic form.
I put Development and Revision together, in the middle of the book, in the hope of suggesting that these are ongoing parts of the same process, rather than representing a beginning and an end.
When I came to ordering the genres I reasoned that creative non-fiction offers beginning writers the easiest segue from the material of their own lives and also from the essay writing they find most familiar. From the personal essay or memoir to fiction may prove a short imaginative step. Poetry leads them then to focus on density and the effects of language. Finally, drama in many ways asks that they distance themselves farthest from autobiography, that they externalize everything verbally or visually.
There is nothing sacred about this order, and I have tried to balance the chapters between self-containment and linkage, so that an instructor who prefers another sequence may shop around in the text and shape his or her course to fit. In practice I think it may be most difficult to alter the sequence of the five techniques chapters, and no problem at all to switch-or omit-any of the genres.
In addition to the "Try This" in each chapter, Appendix A contains a bricolage of collaborative in-class exercises, some of which involve writing, though many are taken from theater, art, dance, meditation, or physical therapy. Some instructors will be eager to try these; others may recoil from them as disruptively boisterous or dreamily new-age. Students are often resistant to getting out of their chairs, embarrassed to pick up a felt-tip, reluctant to make a nonverbal sound. But if I have any proselytizing to do, it is at this pulpit. I say to my students, and also to teachers reading this preface: don't worry about it, go with it, give it a shot. Simple stretching and breathing can break down the rigidity of the classroom. Repeated improvisations such as the "word-at-a-time story" sometimes become the cohesive social force in a writing class. Mask-making sometimes begins with the groans of the artistically challenged and leads to breakthrough on character. "Mirroring" can teach more about narrative than a lecture on conflict or connection. I have over several years become convinced of the useful energy generated by each one of these exercises, and I've tried to indicate the purpose of each one. In the meantime, however, I've relegated them to an appendix for those determined to avoid them.
Further appendices offer a basic prosody for those who want more information about and practice in poetic form, and a glossary of the terms covered in the text.
It often seems pretty well impossible to teach a course across the genres-a semester to do everything, as if you were asked to teach an Intro to Human Nature or The History of Work in sixteen weeks. My hope is that this book will make it feel a little more possible. What Imaginative Writing is not, is comprehensive. It tries to cover the basics in a way that is sound but brief, overwhelming to neither the student nor the personality and methods of the instructor. I will be interested to hear from anyone who teaches from the book how well I have succeeded in this, and how I might improve the book in future editions. (jburroway@english.fsu.edu)
Meanwhile I am grateful to numbers of people, especially my colleagues Elizabeth Dewberry, Robert Olen Butler, Jimmy Kimbrell, and Ned and Elizabeth Stucky-French; and always to my students and former students, of whom I would like to name especially Heather Sellers, Ann Turkle, Michael McClelland, Beth Watzke, Carissa Neff, Debbie Olander, Thom Mannarino, Pat Murphy, William Nesbitt, Tom Bligh, and Sara Pennington. Many of the readings, ideas and exercises in this book are here thanks to their talent, invention, and spirited help. Creative writing exercises tend to be, like scientific information in a more generous time, freely offered, freely shared, and passed from hand to hand. I know that I have cadged, cobbled, and adapted my "Try This" exercises from Marta Mihalyi, Maria Irene Fornes, Aimee Beal, Margaret Rozga, Cheril Dumesnil, Laura-Gray Street, Mary Ann Lando, Gerald Shapiro, Matt Zambito, and Michael Kardos, many of them from the Pedagogy Panels of the Associated Writing Programs. Other ideas will have come to me third-hand, or I will have forgotten where I read or heard them; to those unacknowledged, equal thanks and apologies.
I have relied on the incisiveness and generosity of my reviewers: Dan Bentley-Baker, Florida International University; Michael Bertsch, Shasta College; Jeffrey DeShell, University of Colorado at Boulder; David James, Oakland Community College; Bruce W. Jorgensen, Brigham Young University; Jeff Mann, D.K. Peterson, North Dakota State University; Virginia Tech; Lauren Puccio, Columbia University; Shouhua Qi, Western Connecticut State University; and Michael Ritterbrown, Glendale College; and on the insight and cheer of my editors Adam Beroud and Erika Berg, to all of whom great thanks. My husband, Peter Ruppert, brings light to life and lit.
Janet Burroway
Invitation
to the Writer
I just realize that we start out in these very awkward ways, and we do look a little stupid as we draft, and that's all right . . . You have to be willing to go into the chaos and bring back the beauties.
Tess Gallagher
You . . .
You started learning to write-at the latest-as soon as you were born. You learned within hours to recognize an "audience," and within a few days that expressing yourself would elicit a response. Your basic desires created the fundamental form of story-I want, I want, I WANT!-with its end in gratification (comedy) or denial (tragedy). Within a year you had begun to understand the structure of sentences and to learn rules of immense subtlety and complexity, so that for no precisely understood reason you would always say "little red wagon" rather than "red little wagon." You responded to rhythm and rhyme (One, two. Buckle my shoe). You matched images and explained their meanings (This is a giraffe. Dog is hungry). You invented metaphors (My toes are soldiers). By the time you could speak you were putting together personal essays about what you had done and what had happened to you and forecasting fantasies of your future exploits. By the time you started school you had (mostly thanks to television) watched more drama than the nobility of the Renaissance, and you understood a good deal about how a character is developed, how a joke is structured, how a narrative expectation is met, how dramatic exposition, recognition, and reversal are achieved. You understood the unspoken rules of specific traditions-that Bugs Bunny may change costume but the Road Runner may not, that the lovers will marry, that the villain must die.
You are, in fact, a literary sophisticate. You have every right to write.
This needs saying emphatically and often, because writing is one of those things-like public speaking, flying, and garden snakes-that often calls up unnecessary panic. Such fear is both normal (a high percentage of people feel it) and irrational (statistically, the chances of disaster are pretty low). It is true that some speakers do humiliate themselves, some planes do crash, some snakes are poisonous. Nevertheless, people do learn to speak, fly, and garden. And people learn to shrug at their dread and write.
. . . and writing . . .
All writing is imaginative. The translation of experience or thought into words is of itself an imaginative process. Although there is certainly such a thing as truth in writing, and we can spot falsity when we encounter it in print, these qualities are hard to define, hard to describe, and do not always depend on factual accuracy or inaccuracy. Often what is most original, that is, imaginative, is precisely what "rings true."
Aristotle said that when you change the form of a thing you change its purpose. For example, the purpose of an algebra class is to teach algebra. But if you take a photo of the class, the purpose of the photo cannot be to teach algebra. The picture would probably serve the purpose of commemorating the class and the people in it. On the other hand, if you wrote a short story about that class, its purpose might be (not to teach algebra or to commemorate the class, but) to reveal something about the emotional undertow, the conflict in or between students, the hidden relationships in that apparently staid atmosphere.
It's impossible to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in words, because words are of a different form than experience, and their choice is determined by the vast array of cultural and personal influences. Writers learn very quickly that a written incident is not necessarily credible because it "really happened," and that convincing writing is in the writing and not in the facts. When you write about an experience, you put it in a new form and therefore furnish it with a new purpose. Part of the hard work and the pleasure of writing is discovering what that purpose is. You will never exactly "catch" an experience you have lived, but you may both discover and reveal new insights in the recasting of that experience.
All writing is autobiographical as well as invented. Just as it's impossible to write the whole and literal truth about any experience, so it's also impossible to invent without drawing on your own experience, which has furnished your brain. Your view of yourself, the place you live, the people you know, the institutions you live with, your view of nature and God or the gods will inform not only your dreams and daydreams, what you say, wear, think, and do, but also everything you write. What you write will inevitably reveal to a certain extent both what you think the world is like and what you think it should be like.
Between the two impossibilities-of perfectly capturing your experience in words and of avoiding it altogether-lies the territory that we call "creative." Begin by writing whatever comes to you, recording your observations, trying out your ideas, indulging your fantasies. Then figure out what you want to make of it, what its purpose is, and what it means. Then work toward making it "work"-that is, toward making it meaningful for the reader who is your partner in the imaginative act.
. . . and reading . . .
At the same time, you yourself need to become a reader of a writerly sort, reading greedily, not just for entertainment but also focusing on the craft, the choices, and techniques of the author; "reading the greats," in novelist Alan Cheuse's words, "in that peculiar way that writers read, attentive to the peculiarities of the language . . . soaking up numerous narrative strategies and studying various approaches to that cave in the deep woods where the human heart hibernates."
Reading as a writer involves not asking What does this mean? so much as How does it work? Why has the author made this choice of imagery, voice, atmosphere? What techniques of language, pacing, character contribute to this effect?
Reader/writers sometimes become impatient with this process. "How do you know the author didn't just want to do it that way?" The answer is: you don't. But everything on the page is there because the writer chose that it should be there, and the effectiveness of the piece depends on those choices. The British critic F. R. Leavis used to observe that a poem is not a frog. In order to understand the way a frog works you must kill it, then splay out the various respiratory, digestive, muscular systems, and so forth. But when you "take apart" a piece of literature to discover how it is made, and then put it back together by reading it again, it is more alive than before. It will resonate with all you have learned, and you as a writer know a little better how to reproduce such vitality.
. . . and this book . . .
My creative writing workshop exchanged a few classes with a group of student choreographers. The first time we came into the dance theater, we writers sat politely down in our seats with our notebooks on our laps. The choreographer-dancers did stretches on the carpet, headstands on the steps; some sat backward on the chairs; one folded herself down into a seat like a teabag in a teacup. When they started to dance they were given a set of instructions: Group A is rolling through, up and under; Group B is blue Tuesday; Group C is weather comes from the west. The choreographers began to invent movement; each made up a "line" of dance. They repeated and altered it. They bumped into each other, laughed, repeated, rearranged, and danced it through. They did it again. They adjusted. They repeated. They danced it through. Nobody was embarrassed and nobody gave up. They tried it again. One of the young writers turned to me with a face of luminous discovery. "We don't play enough," she said.
That's the truth. Writing is such a solitary occupation, and we are so used to moiling at it until it's either perfect or due, that our first communal experience of our writing also tends to be awful judgment. Even alone, we internalize the criticism we anticipate and become harsh critics of ourselves. "The progress of any writer," said the great poet Ted Hughes, "is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own police system."
Imaginative Writing assumes that you will play before you work-dance before performing, doodle before fiddling with, fantasize before forming, anything goes before finish something. This is not an unusual idea among writers and teachers of writing. ("Indulge yourself in your first drafts," says novelist Jonathan Lethem, "and write against yourself in revisions.") But it is easier to preach than to practice.
Nevertheless, most of the techniques that writers use are relevant to most forms of imaginative writing and can be learned by playing around in any form. So the first five sections of this book talk about some techniques that are useful in any sort of writing, or relevant to more than one genre, and suggest ways to play with those techniques. The purpose of these chapters is to free the imagination. The sixth chapter talks about ways to develop and revise your experiments into a finished piece. The last four sections discuss what is particular to each of four forms: Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama; and how you can mold some of what you have written toward each of them.
There is a lot of "do this" in the following pages, but a good deal more of "try this." The overriding idea of the book is play-serious, strenuous, dedicated, demanding, exhilarating, enthusiastic, repeated, perfected play. It is the kind of play that makes you a superior swimmer or singer, a first-rank guitar, pool, polo, piano, or chess player. As with any sport or musical skill, a writer's power grows by the practice of the moves and the mastering of the instrument.
Insofar as writing is a skill, it can only be learned by doing. Insofar as writing is "inspired," it may pour out of you obsessively, feverishly, without your seeming to have to make any effort or even without your seeming to have any responsibility for it. When that happens, it feels wonderful, as any writer will tell you. Yet over and over again, writers attest to the fact that the inspiration only comes with, and as a result of, the doing.
. . . and your journal . . .
While you use this book you will be writing one-a journal that should be, first of all, a physical object with which you feel comfortable. Some writers keep notes in a shoebox or under the bed, but your journal probably needs to be light enough to carry around easily, sturdy enough to stand up to serious play, large enough to operate as a capacious hold-all for your thoughts. Think of it as a handbag, a backpack, a trunk, a cupboard, an attic, a warehouse of your mind. Everything can go into it: stuff you like and what you paid too much for, what Aunt Lou gave you and the thing you found in the road, this out-of-date whatsit and that high-tech ware. You never know what you're going to need; absolutely anything may prove useful later on.<EXR NUM="1">
Try This 0.1
In other words, write any sort of thing in your journal, and write various kinds of things:
- An observation
- An overheard conversation
- Lists
- Longings
- Your response to a piece of music
- A rough draft of a letter
- Names for characters
- Quotations from what you are reading
- The piece of your mind you'd like to give so-and-so
- An idea for a story
- A memory
- A dream
- A few lines of a poem
- A fantasy conversation
- Titles of things you are never going to write
- Something else
Your journal is totally forgiving; it is one hundred percent rough draft; it passes no judgments.
Throughout Imaginative Writing there will be prompts, trigger lines, and ideas for playing in your journal. Here are a few general suggestions:
- Freewrite. Gertrude Stein called this "automatic writing." Either on a regular schedule or at frequent intervals, sit down and write without any plan whatsoever of what you are going to write. Write anything that comes into your head. It doesn't matter what it is at all. This is the equivalent of volleying at tennis or improvisation at the piano; it puts you in touch with the instrument and limbers the verbal muscles.
- Focused freewrite. Pick a topic and then do the same thing: focusing on this topic, write for five or ten minutes saying anything at all about it-anything at all-in any order.
- Brainstorm. Start with the question "What if...?" Finish the question and then free-associate around it, absolutely anything that pops into your head-ideas, situations, connections, solutions, and images, no matter how bizarre. This is a problem-solving technique that can also generate energy for imaginative writing. If you need an idea, or if your character is facing a decision, or if you don't know what your setting looks like-whatever the problem, whatever idea might be struggling to surface, brainstorm it and let your mind run free.
* Using the World. Your journal may record your own feelings and problems, but make it more outer-directed than a diary, because training yourself to observe the outside world will help develop the skills of an imaginative writer. Make a daily habit of recording something you experienced or noticed. It may be an overheard remark, an unexpected sight, a person who caught your attention, even a news item or something you learned in a class. Knowing that you are going to write every day will give you a habit of listening and seeing with writing in mind. A writer is a kind of benevolent cannibal who eats the world-or at least, you'll experience the world with an eye and ear toward what use you can make of it.
Make a habit, rather than a chore, of writing in your journal. If you skip a day, it's not the end of the world, but it may well be that, as with a physical workout, you have to coax or cajole yourself into writing regularly before you get to the point when you look forward to that part of your life, can't wait for it, can't do without it. You will know some of the patterns that help you create a habit. Write first thing in the morning? At the same hour every day? After a shower? With a cup of coffee? Before you fall asleep? Use your self-discipline to make yourself sit down and write, but once you get there, tell your inner critic to hush, give yourself permission to write whatever you please, and play.
<EXR NUM="2">
Try This 0.2
Here is a list of lists:
- Things on which I am an expert
- Things I have lost
- Signs of winter
- What is inside my body
- Things people have said to me
- What to take on the journey
- Things I have forgotten
- Things to make lists of
Pick any one of these items to generate a list in your journal.
Pick a single word from your list and write a paragraph about it. Is this the germ of a memoir or a story?
Write a single line about each item on the list. Is this the start of a poem?
. . . and your workshop.
Many of us think of the primary function of a writing workshop as being to criticize, in order to improve, whatever piece of writing is before us. This is, again, absolutely natural, not only because of the way the writing workshop has evolved over the years but because nothing is more natural than to judge art. We do it all the time and we do it out of a valid impulse. If you tell me you've just seen a movie, I don't ask the plot, I ask: how was it? Art sets out to affect us emotionally and intellectually, and whether it has achieved this is of the first interest. The poet and critic John Ciardi said of literature that "it is never only about ideas, but about the experience of ideas," and the first thing we want to know is, naturally, "how was the experience?"
But if the first thing you and your workshop expect is a writer at play, and if in order to play you banish your inner critic and give yourself permission to experiment, doodle, and dance, it doesn't make a lot of sense to subject that play to immediate assessment. I'm going to suggest that for most of the time this book is being used, you avoid the phrases, I like, I don't like, this works, this doesn't work-and all their equivalents. It may be harder to forgo praise than blame, but praise should be a controlled substance too. Instead, discipline yourself to explore whatever is in front of you. Not what I like, but what this piece is like. Interrogate it, suggest its context, explore its nature and its possibilities:
- Is there a drama in this situation?
- I'm wondering what this word suggests.
- This reminds me of . . .
- It's like . . .
- I think this character wants . . .
- What if . . . ?
- The rhythm is . . .
- Could this be expanded to . . . ?
- Is the conflict between . . . ?
- Does this connect with . . . ?
- The atmosphere seems . . . and so forth.
This kind of descriptive, inquisitive, and neutral discussion of writing is hard. It will pay off in the freedom that each writer feels to write and in the flexibility of critical response you're developing in the workshop. In the later part of the course, when everyone is writing in a particular form and revision is the legitimate focus of the work, there will be a time to discuss not only what this piece is trying to do but also where and whether it succeeds. At that point, critique will help.<EXR NUM="3">
Even when you arrive at the point that criticism is relevant and helpful, there are a few basic protocols for the workshop that should always be observed:
* The piece is under discussion. The author is not. Make sure your comments relate to the nature of the writing and not (even by implication) to the character of the writer. Separate the writer from the voice or character.
* Continue to interrogate the piece: what kind is it, what does it suggest, what is its apparent aim?
* The goal of the workshop is to make this piece the best that it can be. There's no place for dismissal or disregard. On the contrary, the obligation of the workshop is to identify and foster the promise in every story, essay, poem or drama.
* As the writer, your obligation is to listen attentively, take everything in, and keep your natural defensiveness in check. Your workshop leader may (or may not) offer you a chance to speak. But this is the least important part of the workshop process for you. The most important part comes later, when you get back to work. Then (and only then) you will begin to sort out what's most useful.
Try This 0.3
Make use of these prompts or trigger lines for easy freewrites. Pick one of them-quickly; don't think about it too much-write it down and keep writing. Anything at all. Whatever the prompt suggests. Keep going. A little bit more.
- This journal is
- My mother used to have
- There was something about the way he
- The house we lived in
- In this dream I was
- She got out of the car
- The first thing I want in the morning
More to Read
Bernays, Anne and Pamela Painter. What If...?. New York: Longman, 2003.
Friedman, Bonnie. Writing Past Dark. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
Insert Chapter 1 - Opening Image:
Laurie Lipton, "Leashed Passion"
pickup from page 2 of 1e
see attachment 1.0
<EXR NUM="1"><PHOIND NUM="1" ID="PH.00.001"/>Warm-up
Write a paragraph about a single small part of this picture (not the whole beast, but its leash or feet, for example). Include the color, the smell, sound, texture, and taste of the thing described. How does this focus on sensory detail create a particular feel or emotional response? How does it differ from the impact of the picture as a whole?
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
English language -- Rhetoric.
Creative writing (Higher education).
College readers.