Writing Exercises!

These are for homework. I don't think they'll take too long. (And some of y'all have already done some.)

1. Emotion exercise. Think of a time you felt extreme emotion. Any kind. Don't tell me what emotion it is. Just tell me (1) What you heard. (2) What you saw. (3) What you felt. (tactile sensation, physical sensations, not emotional.) (4) What you tasted. (5) What you smelled. (6) To finish it off, give us two last things. First, a time marker ("It was 1999" or "I was Seven" or "It was prom night") and second, what was going on. When you've done all that, read your writing out loud. Do you still need to tell us what emotion you were feeling for it to be clear? If so, how can you change some of the words of 1-2-3-4-5 so that you don't? (Think connotations. "Clobbered," for example, has a connotation of being beaten, badly defeated. It has pain and sweat and slobber in there. These can all certainly imply emotions!)

2. "Grandmas." Write down 5-10 things that the word "Grandmas" makes you think of. Then, think of your own Grandma. Write down 5-10 things about your Grandma that are NOT on the list above. Think about the fact that if the word "Grandmas" made you think of all of those other things, that all of those things are already in the connotation of the word "Grandma" and you don't have to re-use any of them. Strategic use of words for their connotations makes your writing more efficient, and also less boring.

3. October 29, 1999. Think about that day. Now, without telling me anything that you're not 100% sure is true, tell me about what you did that day. How much do you have written down? A lot? I don't think so. Second part of exercise: Do the same thing, but give yourself permission to lie and/or fudge the truth. Question. When you did this, did you suddenly remember something from your past that you're pretty sure IS true? (Even if it was on a slightly different date than October 29, 1999. No one says you need to give a "hard" date to your narratives. Just time markers like "I was seventeen.") Sometimes the human brain is pretty funny. So while you don't want to fill your narratives with lies (because what if you go on Oprah and she reams the crap out of you for it? She's done it before), go ahead and give yourself permission to create a DRAFT that's full of lies. This is especially good to do if you can't think of what actually happened. It's probably in your brain somewhere, you just have to trick your brain into accessing it.