Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Fiction Writing Outside Details



Follow the instructions below, focusing on one step at a time, to generate material for a single, or multiple, piece(s) of writing.

1.       Take a walk around campus (20 min; check your watch or set a timer). Make a list of at least 25-30 concrete details; try to stay away from entirely nature-related details but include a variety of kinds of details from things you encounter/notice/observe/think about while walking around campus.

2.      Come back to the classroom. Sit and work on the following, separately from the previous list of details:
Write a 10-sentence (or more) paragraph that describes an emotion you are feeling today without using the word for the emotion or stating it explicitly. Describe the feeling through all of the senses. Use images and sentences that evoke the senses, use metaphor or analogy to describe and evoke even further, use detail and description to make the writing dynamic and lively. Create language and images that are unexpected and get at the emotion from a perspective you maybe have not thought about before.
3.      Turn your original list of details from above into a list of images (whole phrases, lines you might use in a poem, or sentences).

4.       Finally, once you have done all of the above, see what you have. Work on deciding what to do next. Combine the materials from the detail list, the image list, and the paragraph to construct a single or multiple poem/poems or story/stories. You decide the genre and how to use the material you’ve generated to do the next step of the writing process. Write a draft(s), keep working on it to revise, continue, etc.

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