LIST OF GRADED EXERCISES for INTRO TO CREATIVE WRITING (FALL 2006)

MIDTERM PORTFOLIO

1.  Scene versus Exposition

Go through a piece of your writing and find a passage of summary that could, or maybe even should, be in scene.  Don’t fret right now about whether scene is absolutely necessary here.  The point is to develop the skill of automatically asking yourself whether that option will help you.  Answering those basic questions of fiction (who, what, where, when, why), rewrite the passage as a scene.

2.  Developing Character

You saw someone who intrigued you at a MARTA stop or in the streets.  Suppose it rained, wind blew and drove the rain, everybody looked worried and ran toward shelter, but there he was—walking as though it were sunny, smiling, and looking obscenely happy.  What’s his secret?

3.  Dialogue

Write a page or two of typical dialogue—you can record it and write it down, or try to re-create it—with someone fairly close to you.  Swap your dialogue with a writing partner, and see how much the person you’re describing comes through in his or her voice.  Pay attention to syntax.  How much is grammatically correct or incorrect?  How much slang or dialect appears in different speakers’ voices? 

4. Taste

I will bring an item of food for everyone to taste.  After exploring the sight, textures, and smell of this food, taste it.  Describe it in detail, then go on to whatever images and metaphorical associations arise.  What in your own life is most like, say, a mango?  Begin a short essay outlining what people, feelings, events, and memories this food conjures up for you.

5. Sound

Each person will bring a CD of music that evokes a strong emotion.  Write for a few minutes about each track, trying not to describe the music directly but focusing instead on the images and memories it evokes.  Read a few aloud without mentioning which piece of music acted as the trigger.  The rest of the group will try to guess which music corresponds to which piece of writing.

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FINAL PORTFOLIO

1. Plot

Let your character from exercise 2 (midterm portfolio) fall in  love with expensive wines.  He doesn’t become a drunk—he cannot afford it—but he must have one bottle of wine that costs $100 every evening precisely at eight.  He goes into debts, starts a second job, moonlights, and steals, just to support his habit.

2. Point of View

Use your first-person voice to relate an imagined event as if it were happening to your or had happened to you.

3. Material for a poem: gritty realism

If you think poems need to be pretty and about beautiful things, this is an exercise for you.  Write a poem that rejects the conventionally beautiful (and often, therefore, the trite) in favor of gritty realism or down-to-earth slang.  Instead of writing about tulips or sunsets, write about electric can openers or acid rain.  Choose words that are as unpoetic as possible.  This is poetry in the raw, without its makeup.  It can borrow from the vocabulary of the newspaper, the supermarket tabloid, the disk-jockey, the commercial.  If your results sound like a “conventional” poem, you’re doing it. . . wrong.

4. Concreteness and Abstraction

Write a poem the way an abstract painter uses pigment: splashes of color arranged in some pattern as you go.  Jackson Pollack stood above a canvas laid flat on the floor and dribbled, flicked, flung, or poured paint across the surface.  His “action painting” depended on energy and on paying keen attention as he transformed a mess, a series of accidents, into a work of art.  Try to “splash” images form line to line, keeping each image clear and sharp and vivid but not trying to connect them in any logical way.  You’ll find it difficult to keep the poem flowing unless you use some transitions, but try to make them “positional” (left, next to, after, across the street, then) rather than logical.  You might start listing images, but that’s a kind of . . . cheating.  Try to make things up as you go.

5. Process Memo

Write a few paragraphs about your writing process, the effect of the workshop on your writing, and how the study of the craft and technique affected your writing (i.e. did your view on any genre change?  How?  Why?  How does this “translate” for you in your approach to writing?)