On Writing Exercises by Jill Myers

An Interesting Exercise

At the 2007 MCWC Conference, workshop leaders Rebecca Lawton and Jordan Rosenfeld assigned an exercise I liked, which was to examine the last full paragraph of “A River Runs Through It” and write something similar. We were asked to use our own situation but with the original writers’ form and phraseology.  The exercise gave us permission to be inspired by another writer’s talent, and the notion that adaptation isn’t necessarily plagiarism. 

In the English Department Newsletter I receive from Stanford, there is a piece by Jeanne Althouse, one of Nancy Packer’s current students, responding to an assignment to write something a la Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (a one paragraph short-short in which one person is giving instruction to another, ending with a question.)  I read Ms. Althouse’s piece with a good deal of envy, and also two thoughts—I wish I’d written that, and another one—maybe I will.  

What I’ve Learned
In a Continuing Education class I took from Stanford professor Nancy Packer she said to “hit the ground running” when you start a story.  I’ve never forgotten that instruction because as a metaphor it is so lame.  Hitting the ground means that for a few minutes you are essentially a pile of crap—confused, your body hurting and maybe your own personal blood leaking out of your skin.  You’re trying to figure out what has happened, and instead of leaping to your feet you whimper for a while in your puddle of aches and bruises until some living breathing soul touches you and only then are you able to struggle up to maybe a sitting position.  But in spite of the clichéd metaphor I knew what she meant.  Start right in.  What happened to get you to this point is not what the reader wants to know.  He’s interested in the ‘who what why and when.’ If you can work all this information into a single sentence, like  ‘He sped away after she fell out of the car, and for a moment as she lay in a pile of aches and bruises all she could do is wonder where she was and how she got there” you have your start, although I’d prefer some quotes over the indirect address. Here’s a pitfall.  Don’t stuff your sentences with clauses.  Here’s another one.  Don’t fall in love with a word or phrase.  And for God’s sakes, write about something important to you.  If you feel disgusted by the image of someone being pushed out of a speeding car by a disgruntled boyfriend because she absolutely refused to …—here’s another thing, you have to be careful about sexual references.  Writing about sex may be too hard for you at this point.  Anias Nin did it, but are you Anias Nin?  Maybe so, but I doubt it.  An ellipsis (three dots) is handy for writers avoiding difficult description, but back to my point.  If you’re repelled by the torture scenes in ‘24’ and the utter implausibility of the ‘007’ films, don’t write about a girl falling out of a speeding car and ending up in a pile of aches and bruises, with her new silk pants shredded along with parts of her anatomy that were not ususally exposed.  Forget the guy and the girl and the cheek-scraping highway.  Maybe you want to concentrate on the dog, the one that ran in front of the car and made the guy swerve so that the girl fell against the poorly latched door after she refused categorically to…  Everyone likes dogs, and whether the severely squashed dog was whimpering in the street alongside the girl, or whether the car missed the dog (except for a small section of tail it didn’t need anyway) and it trotted over the whimpering girl and began licking the blood from her scraped cheek—the dog’s the thing.  Don’t write from the point of view of the dog, though, nobody can get away with that, and don’t tell me about Steven Millhauser.  Are you Steven Millhauser?  I doubt it.  Don’t write from the point of view of body parts either, even though Eve Ensler has had a good deal of commercial success, although "speak my bleeding cheek" has a certain alliteritive elegance as a title.  If you feel closely connected to the dog, you’ll have a better story, and you can still keep the guy and the girl whimpering in a pile of aches and bruises on the highway.  Another thing, don’t go all self-referential and post-modern-y on me, and forget about being clever.  You want a real story, not something that shows off how witty you are.  Tell jokes at the dinner table if you want attention.  Finally, Ms. Packer said that good stories often have a circular form, ending with a reference to the situation that began the tale. Not a big finger pointing  ‘look, look’ but a subtle bringing the reader back to where the piece began.  Sometimes this is all the resolution your story gets, and you have to leave the whimpering girl and the dog vainly trying to thump his tail on the road for the sake of that big check from the New Yorker.  But after all, isn’t that what we all want?

Comments

[Jordan Rosenfeld]

Yes, that was Rebecca's exercise, which she calls Modeling. So much fun and such interesting results. Incidentally, we're leading an online "playshop" which offers 20 days of activities and writing prompts. I don't know if it's ok to post the link here (so feel free to remove if not): www.writefree.us/bookstore.html.

[Judith Matson]

Jill,
I love the wild ride I just experienced reading this piece -- and I'm only a bit bloody, as I sit with my aches and bruises on the highway. It's interesting to see just how effective it is to keep circling around the bloodied pile, although that "circling around" now reminds me of vultures. Where to take the vultures?
Judith