new posts in all blogs
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: creative writing exercise, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 12 of 12
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: creative writing exercise in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
By: Rachel Scheller,
on 7/17/2012
Blog:
Guide to Literary Agents
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
science fiction,
novel,
fantasy,
short stories,
paranormal,
Excerpts,
Back to Basics,
creative writing exercise,
craft/technique,
Literary Fiction Writing,
Writing Your First Draft,
Craft & Technique,
There Are No Rules Blog by the Editors of Writer's Digest,
Haven't Written Anything Yet, Writing for Beginners,
How to Improve Writing Skills,
Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy,
plot/structure,
Add a tag
I was reading through some of our older science fiction titles, and I came upon Worlds of Wonder by David Gerrold (published in 2001). As I was flipping through the book, I read an opening line that intrigued me:
“All writing is list-making. Nothing more. The trick is knowing what to put next on the list.”
This seemed a puzzlingly simple notion–that developing the plot of your story was in some way akin to the act of jotting down your grocery list. And yet, as I started to read further, what the author was saying made a lot of sense:
The thing about Lego bricks is that you can build just about anything you can imagine–if you’re patient enough. People have built whole cities out of Lego bricks. The problem is that you have to figure out yourself how to put the things together. While there might be instructions on how to build a specific kind of Lego castle, there are no instructions on how you can build the castle that exists in your own imagination.
Planning your story is the same experience. You have a sense of what you want it to be, how you want the pieces to fit together, but actually getting this brick to fit next to that one…. Pretty soon, you start to wonder how the hell Arthur C. Clarke and Larry Niven and Frederik Pohl and Richard Matheson and Jack Finney and Anne McCaffrey and C.J. Cherryh and Connie Willis can make it look so easy.
David goes on to suggest this exercise, which I share with you below. (A sidenote: What’s particularly amusing about it is that he is the writer of the episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” from Star Trek: The Original Series, which is, in my opinion, one of the best Star Trek episodes ever.)
Get yourself a stack of index cards. Write a one-line synopsis of each specific scene that you think should be in your story, one scene per card. Don’t worry about writing them down in any specific order. Just write them down as fast as you think of them:
- Lt. Uhura brings a tribble aboard the Enterprise.
- Lt. Uhura first gets the tribble from a local merchant.
- Uhura’s tribble has a litter of little tribbles.
- Scotty discovers tribbles in the air vents.
- Kirk finds a tribble on his captain’s chair.
- Kirk and Spock beam over to the space station. Kirk opens up the storage compartments and lots of tribbles fall down on his head.
But this isn’t enough for a complete story. You need a second plot line too, something to complicate the first one:
- The Klingons want shore leave, but what they really want is … to disrupt the plan for Sherman’s Planet.
- The Klingons are on the speace station. A barroom brawl breaks out.
- Kirk investigates the fight. He bawls out Scotty and restricts him to quarters. Scotty is glad for the chance to read his technical manuals.
- The plan for Sherman’s Planet is that Earth will plant a new grain. If nothing earthlike will grow, the Klingons get the planet.
- The Klingons are here to poison the grain.
- The tribbles eat the poisoned grain, reproduce like crazy and fall on Kirk’s head, but McCoy discovers that they’re dying.
Now, take all these separate cards and shuffle them together and start laying them out on the kitchen table in the order you think they should go. First organize each plot line in its own thread. Then you can go back and forth between separate threads, picking up the next appropriate scene from each.
When you have all the cards laid out in order, go through them as if you’re reading a comic book or a storyboard and see if they re
You’re on a golf course taking part in a fundraiser to cure a disease that’s near and dear to your heart. On the 11th hole, you hit a ball into the woods. While searching for that ball, you see a white rabbit that stops, looks you right in the eye and says, “Follow me.”
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
Want more creative writing prompts? Consider:
The Writer’s Book of Matches
When you go to get dressed one morning, you discover that there really is a skeleton in your closet. Write this scene—discover how it got there, why it is there, what to do with it now.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
Want more creative writing prompts? Consider:
The Writer’s Book of Matches
This time, you’re in too deep. You’re gambling losses have been mounting and, with a recent ill-advised bet, have put you $50,000 in debt. Your bookie, knowing you don’t have that kind of cash, is willing to wipe your debt clean if you carry out a very dangerous mission for him.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
Want more creative writing prompts? Consider:
The Writer’s Book of Matches
You’re on your way to lunch when you walk by a crowd of people staring up toward the sky. You look up and see someone at the top of a building getting ready to jump to his or her death. Quickly you realize you know this person—in fact, it’s someone from work. Something about this moment overtakes, so you rush to the top of the top of the building to save this person’s life.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
Want more creative writing prompts? Consider:
The Writer’s Book of Matches
A friend rings your doorbell way too early in the morning to be ringing doorbells. You answer the door in your PJs, and the friend says, “Pack a bag quickly. I have to get out of here now and need you to come with me.” You are intrigued.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
Want more creative writing prompts? Consider:
The Writer’s Book of Matches
You get a message, it is obviously for you, but it is scrawled in lipstick on a mirror in a public restroom. It’s unexpected, but now you know exactly where the killer is hiding. It’s time to find him and, hopefully, your friend (and hopefully your friend is still alive). Write this scene.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
Want more creative writing prompts? Consider:
The Writer’s Book of Matches
The person of your dreams shows up on your doorstep, asking if you’d like to go out for coffee. You are surprised and confused, but you say yes. At the coffee shop, as he/she is talking, you discover that he/she thinks that you are someone else. Instead of coming clean, you go with it—only to be foiled by an unexpected twist that reveals your identity.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
Want more creative writing prompts? Consider:
The Writer’s Book of Matches
You’ve been given the opportunity to see any band (dead or alive) at a live concert in your hometown. At the end of the show, you bump into an old high school friend who is working security and offers you (and the friend you brought to the concert) backstage passes. What happens next is an adventure you’ll never forget.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
Want more creative writing prompts? Consider:
The Writer’s Book of Matches
You’re at lunch when your smartphone buzzes with an e-mail from your boss: “Don’t forget, we have a meeting in 10 minutes.” Of course you did forget, so you rush out of the restaurant and attempt to make it before it starts. But a crazy chain of events stops you from getting back in time for the meeting.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
Want more creative writing prompts? Consider:
The Writer’s Book of Matches
You’ve just moved into a new house and are fixing it up. In the process of painting you find an odd crack in the wall. As you explore further, you find out it’s a secret passageway—and you have no idea where it leads. You decide to grab a flashlight and go exploring.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
Want more creative writing prompts? Consider:
The Writer’s Book of Matches
Most of my courses have now come to an end. I will be teaching at a summer school in mid July and I'm planning a couple of special workshops in August but mostly it is all winding down...so here is a perpetual creative writing exercise for those who can't ignore the itch to write...
You can repeat the exercise again and again, each time going off in a new direction. How much time you spend on it is up to you - it can be 10 minutes or two years. (But only if the exercise has developed into a novel – there is such a thing as too much polishing.)
The Rules
You can break them, twist them and even ignore them entirely. Remember, this is Creative Writing. It is not A level English, or Leaving Cert or High School Diploma. These are rules you can chuck as soon as they stop being useful.
1) Take two fiction books – any two: love them or hate them, it doesn’t matter. But if you choose novels from different genres the challenge is greater.
2) Go to page 101 in the first book
3) Select the first full sentence that doesn’t contain someone’s name or a reference to a specific time or place (unless you want to: see above). That means you are free to reject Sherwood Forest but really should accept one that mentions a forest.
4) Go to page 201 in the second book. Again select the first full sentence that doesn’t nail you down too rigidly. (Best to avoid something like: With a sigh, Claude hailed a hansom cab knowing that tomorrow he would be leaving dear old London and be sailing for South America and his uncle’s diamond mine...)
5) The first book will give you the opening sentence of this passage of writing. Don’t call it a story yet. It is just about to be born and you have to wait to see what it will grow into. I like the word passage because it’s not intimidating. It doesn’t commit you to anything except writing and it gives you the freedom to stop after a page.
6) The second book gives the second sentence. Use it somewhere, somehow, on the first page; or in the first 250 words; or within four paragraphs of the opening….you get the idea, you have to work your way towards it pretty quickly.
7) Change pronouns (she, he, I, they) and past and present tense to be consistent. And that's it....
Here's the two sentences I've come up with...see where they take you.
The first sentence is from The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (winner of the Booker in 2008)
They had seen things like this happening before
0 Comments on The EVERLASTING creative writing exercise as of 1/1/1900
.jpeg?picon=3680)