Wednesday Y.A.W.c #2

(Young Adults Writing creatively!)

What you need:
A hat or a box to put a bunch of 3x5 cards in.
Enough 3x5 cards for your entire class.


The Set-Up:
“Now I’m going to give you a prompt, and then we’re all going to write for ten minutes. When the ten minutes is up, we’re going to put our cards into this box, but don’t put your names on them. Then, when we’re done, we’re going to draw cards out at random and read them out loud one by one anonymously, followed by a quick critique of things that might have been done better. I want all of you to listen and take notes as if each story were your own, because you’ll learn a lot more about how to write better if you do.”


The Activity:
Hand out 3x5 cards and remind your students not to put their names on them. If they want to claim their work after it has been drawn, read and critiqued, that’s okay, but the anonymity of the exercise will lead to better critiques because people won’t be afraid to say what needs to be said. After a ten minute period of writing from a prompt, (any prompt will do - - what is your dream vacation, write about the moon, etc.) have your students put the cards into a “hat” so they can be drawn out randomly. For each one, give the reader student time to read the story out loud, critique the piece, and then open the floor for an open critique of the piece. Do this with each story.

Wednesday Writing Prompts XVII

1.Think about the place where you’ve felt the most at home. It could be the memory of a childhood home left behind long ago, it could be somewhere you currently live, or maybe even a place that isn’t static– like the arms of a relative or a lover. Write about it, set a story there, or start a story there. Put the feeling of being home into a story, a piece of poetry, the start of a grand novel, or whatever you feel inspired to write.

2. Come up with a totally surreal (and maybe even “laughable”) idea – like steam locomotives that ply tracks of light through the heavens and achieve FTL speeds while carrying passengers between planets. Now, take that gnarly idea (or go for more than one idea) and write a serious story that features it. Make it dramatic, real, something where the story overshadows the unconventional elements without making them extraneous. Something that makes people go “woah” or “wtf?” without losing them to silliness or weak storylines.

3. Spend some time brainstorming the most utterly alien creature you can think up. Use beyond thinking– come up with a great, amazing idea and then take it several steps deeper and further. Remove familiar elements of earth life, even if it makes you feel weird (we’re going for utterly alien here) like standard ways of consumption, standard forms of communication, the configuration of body parts. Consider what might have evolved on another planet, what traits might have been more advantageous than others in a totally different environment. Now, write a story that includes that completely alien being. (It doesn’t even have to be Sci-Fi– it could be anything from magic realist/surrealist to alternate history to fantasy.) See where your ideas take you, and remember to always take that one great idea another step further.

4. Most people hate the 9-5 grind and feel trapped within it, cogs and gears in a never-resting machine that only gives the individual about as much recognition as a luddite might give a single component on a computer board– until it blows out. And such it is that sometimes people caught in the grind utterly snap. Write a story that incorporates these elements. It could be the final thoughts of a company man the instant before he commits some horrific deed, the deed itself, the suicide note, a survey of the damage he does on his way out, or anything else you can think of. Remind the world that the 9-5 grind isn’t as great and happy as the smiling corporate image of working America might have us believe it is.

5. If the world as we know it were to suddenly collapse, what would it be like? Would you survive? How? Write a story that deals with this. What would happen to people all over the world if suddenly massive solar activity wiped out and fried every piece of electronics on the planet and killed the entire power grid for weeks on end? With a failing economy, no refrigeration and no heating or cooling, would the cities become mad, uncontainable zones of crime and rioting? Would the fabric of society drop out beneath the teeming mass of humanity, leaving only those on the fringe to struggle with their tomato gardens and pet goats? Use your imagination, play with ideas, show us a more real “day after tomorrow” than anything we’ve seen yet.

6. Have you ever built anything with your own two hands? A model? A ceramic vase? A box in a wood shop? Think about the process, about how you felt while you were building it and about how you felt when it was done. Now, take those feelings, those emotions and sensations, and put them into a story. Let the reader experience the feeling of creativity, of the creation of idea in the mind, the process of giving it life, and the sensations that play on the heart when it is finally finished, whether they be good or bad.

7. Tattoos are truly an interesting subject. To some, they are taboo, synonymous with long-haired liberals, radicals, sailors and biker gangs. To others, they are a statement of something deeper, an aspect of the personality that comes through, painted in the skin as a permanent symbol of a part of the soul that might otherwise never be seen. Spend some time thinking about tattoos, how you feel, how others might feel, things people have said about tattoos, tattoos you might want or have gotten in the past, etc. and then write a story that incorporates some of these ideas.

8. Everyone lies now and again. Some people do it all the time, and some do it so rarely it seems almost as if they’re angelically honest. Think about a lie you’ve told, big or small, and then think about where things went from there. Were you eventually caught in the lie, or was it a huge lie that no one ever questioned and that stands to this day? Now, write a story about it, looking at that lie from any angle (or multiple angles!)

9. Give sentience to an object for a while. Think about what it might be like to be a doorknob on the door of a busy shop, what it might be like to be the knife on a soldier’s hip, the one copy of the exam that gets left out when students are absent on test day. What’s it like to be that object? How does it feel? What is it thinking about? What’s the crisis, the climax? Be creative, and see where the thoughts of an otherwise inanimate object take you.

10. Some people put a lot of credence into astrological symbols, while others do not. Think for a moment about how you feel when it comes to the zodiac and the meanings hidden in the symbols within it. Now, write something. It can be as simple as a conversation between two people who hold opposing points of view, or as out there as some surrealist envisioning of fantasy that involves symbols of the zodiac as keys to unlocking some mystical power. Be creative, see where your ideas take you, and spend lots of time brainstorming for that cool idea that is just a step further than the last awesome idea you had.

My Cat Monkey

For he is passionate as any lover
For he lies about, lethargic in his ways
For his fur is white, his ears and paws brown
For his eyes are blue
For his meow is keen and high
For his nose is soft and inquisitive
For he goes limp and begins to purr
For he loves to be held
For he used to want much for attention
For he used to stink
For he became too distracted by his testicles
For we had to remove them

(If you get this joke, you're either an English Major, or you've spent too much time reading archaic British lit.)

Wednesday Writing Prompts VI

1. Create an end of the world, apocalyptic scenario, and then invent a technology (or other creative means) with which a fraction of humanity can be saved from it. Now project the setting of your story several centuries (or more) into the future from there. How has the presence of this technology or means effected the lives of the people living in that time? What are the new “big problems” and larger changes in the structure, mythology, and general way of life of the survivors? What is it like to live in this time? What are the little things? The common problems? (If you’re strapped for ideas, consider the “traction cities” of Phillip Reeve’s “Mortal Engines” or the “Vaults” of the Fallout series.)

2. Visit an unfamiliar place (like a coffee shop in a different town) and sit around “people watching”. Work on setting a scene in the place, describe the features that make it unique, and feel free to draw from existing features, people, and even individual conversations as you work.

3. Study and existing illness (or create a new one) that may or may not be fatal. Now, pen the story of a person who has contracted that illness. What kind of symptoms is that person suffering? What does it feel like? Taste like? Smell like? Make the reader feel the experience exactly as the victim would. Use fear and familiar sensations of illness to maximum effect.

4. Take a moment from your past where you made the wrong decision and in doing so altered the course of your life in a way that you’re not entirely happy with. Now, imagine you have the chance to fix it, to talk to or trick your past self into making the right decision. How do you go about it? What do you say or do? Does it work? How does your present (then future) change as a result?

5. The lone wolf is a key character type that recurs in every genre of fiction that has ever been printed or penned (even romance, though the loner might get snared eventually.) Create a piece of fiction that incorporates such a character, either as the main driving force of the story, or as a character who interacts directly with the main character and in enough of a way that we can’t help but watch him/her and be interested.

6. Write a song, revise it, even go so far as to put it to music if you feel so inclined! Make it real, imagine it performed live, and then build a story around that song. Make it the centralmost metaphor for the story, and the very crux upon which the entire story rotates.

7. Step outside your bounds. Think about something that you think you “can’t write” or “suck at” and force yourself to write it. If you get stuck, study stories that follow the same idea, pick them apart and try to figure out what their authors are doing, how they’re able to write what you think you cannot. Remember, no matter what you might think, you can write anything. It just takes time, effort, and practice.

8. Create your own mythos – H.P. Lovecraft did it with Cthulhu and the elder gods, and others have done it since (like Alan Campbell and the mythos of Ulcis and Labyrinths that rises out of the novel “Scar Night” or the Faith of Yevon from Final Fantasy X.) Write the stories that tie the gods, goddesses and aspects of faith together for an entire people, and make a series of short stories (or even just one, like a creation story) out of them, almost as if you were the chief historian or head theologian dedicated to the preservation of all knowledge associated with the faith.

9. Languages are constantly changing. Going back a thousand years, even English becomes virtually unrecognizable to people who speak the modern tongue as their first language. Take a look at some of the most recent changes that have taken place in the language (or in any given pidgin or creole) and then exaggerate and project them into the future. Create a tongue that might be spoken in the next hundred, several hundred, or even one thousand years. Get creative: introduce new mannerisms, new expressions, concepts, words, and even grammatical rules that reflect where the language has gone in the intervening time. What kind of impact would spacefaring frontiersmen have on the language? Alien contact? Exposure to humans from other universes? Other realities? Now, write a story either told in that language, or featuring someone who speaks that way. (If you need ideas, consider the difference in the English spoken by the characters in Joss Whedon’s Firefly, or the difference between forms of Stripjap in Richard K. Morgan’s novel Woken Furies.

10. Take a historical figure like Einstein or Gengis Khan (or even a group of historical figures) and put them in an unfamiliar environment. It could be your present, the future, the distant past, or another planet/universe altogether. How would Winston Churchill and Joan of Arc react if they were both suddenly abducted by the same trans-dimensional alien ship and then put in close proximity? You can also consider where people who have disappeared have gone. What really happened to Amelia Earhart? Jimmy Hoffa? Does it involve a ‘37 chevy floating inexplicably in a distant corner of the galaxy?

Literary Cyberpunk

Literary Cyberpunk. To some, the idea probably sounds almost oxymoronic– the idea that Cyberpunk, this bastard child of Science Fiction and Film Noir that hangs at the bottom of a long cord of darker futures and intentionally drags itself through the grit and dirt of society in order to better project a speculative future into the realm of fiction could be more than a fecund curiosity. To some, it is little more than another broken branch of escapist and artless prose aimed at the sick and deranged, a shiny and worthless pebble to distract those of us not smart enough or enlightened enough to confine our literary tastes to the aged and the normal. They look down upon readers of what is distastefully referred to as “genre fiction” and raise on pillars books and authors who meekly tread down the well-worn paths of everyday life and recast them in the trappings of literary, non-genre fiction in order to give them a sort of meaning and life in the same way that a corpse is given meaning and life if it is painted by an artist as a man in a suit, sitting on a park bench with a briefcase and a newspaper. They worship the dead and the unimaginative retellings of memories that could have come from any man on the street and pin medals on authors almost the instant they draw their last breaths. Literature, as a singular non-genre category into which the books favored by the bourgeois fall, is sick and bland, is a slow, suffocating death stamped out in print.

It does, however, have one redeeming quality– the messages, the concepts, and the life meanings it imparts in the reading. Literature is the bare bones of reality and life, of concept and meaning, an ominous skeleton presented naked before a crowd, with just enough skin to show that it once was alive. What the world needs is literature, but literature heavy in imagination. The corpse must be given more than skin or clothes or a briefcase and a newspaper. It must be replaced with a starship or a purple sky, with a man in an diving bell astride a rocket-powered apple, or a man from an alternate future out to change the wrong past. Thoroughly beaten periods in history must be replaced or recast into the grand and sweeping vistas of the future. Instead of calling Space Westerns “Bat Durstons” with a sour and hateful flick of the tongue, we should be looking into the frontiers of the past and consider not only what they teach us about ourselves, but what they can teach us about where we may end up in the future. Space is out there, the future is out there, new upheavals, new revolutions, new periods of social reform and unrest are waiting to be found in the depths of an uncast future. Can something as transgressive as Cyberpunk be literary? Can it be woven and crafted in such a way that there is something of value to be gained from reading it? Yes, and such writing should be more widely recognized and available to readers. Even if you consider what writers like Neal Stephenson, Philip K. Dick or George Alec Effinger have already accomplished toward this end, there is something out there still to be done, still to be discovered. True, enriching and meaningful literature should not be bland. It should be imaginative! It should invade the mind with imagery and meaning, with secret messages riding in on the backs of jetbikes or lost in the bumperstickers of passing hoversedans. It should quicken in the mind and make us question our own lives, make us work toward utopian futures and long to set foot beyond this cradle we call Earth.

What the world needs now are literary and linguistic activists. People who stand up and realize that there are still places and ways to create higher orders of intellectual art that challenge and inspire, that inform and entertain. Are you with me? This is the frontier. This is where the root of a thousand preconceived notions lays exposed and ready to be severed, ready to be cut so that the literary world and the world of imagination can truly soar, and soar together, without the anchors of a stuffy, bourgeois past that even in passing leaves the taste of dust and emptiness to linger on the mind.

Experimentation in Fiction

Let’s face it, fiction that reads like an essay from the Oxford of the industrial revolution is boring.

We write and speak in such a beautiful language, a language that lends itself so readily to poetic metaphor, to phrases and strings of bound together words that can produce images with such life that we truly feel how green a verdant and glowing glade is– but even this example is basic and paltry. It certainly touches on the beauty of the language, but still leaves the greater body of the possibilities of English bound and gagged, tied to a rock to be picked apart day by day like some linguistic Prometheus. The true beauty comes with thinking beyond (beyond the beyond and the beyond that lies beyond it) to what is on the other side of that which seems flat, endless and impermeable.

The other day my little sister asked me the simple question: “What is beyond the sky?” My answer: “Space and everything in it, the planets and the stars, everything in the universe we think of when we watch Star Trek or Stargate. “But,” She asked– and this is the real kicker ~~>

“But, big brother, what’s beyond space?”

“A Mc Donalds and a parking lot” Kate Braverman says in her surrealist work entitled Near Death Experiences. “Then the final mall. And a sort of outdoor warehouse where a raw wind blows giant stacks of non-fire-resistant pajamas. The ones taken off the American market and sold in the Third World. Then the piles of blankets subject to spontaneous combustion. And the boxes of baby formula without the right vitamins. And the medicines with the known side effects, the ones that twist bones and incite cancer”

What is beyond space? What is beyond reality? Behind the words, the meanings, the way spots of ink fit together on the page to stain the mind with images. Why divide poetry and prose when the best prose is poetry? When you can tell a story in a sentence that blossoms with images, concepts, possibilities and sacred, individual meanings. “He woke to find the Dinosaur was still there.” Casares writes, and that is a story. “One night, I dreamed I was a butterfly.” Writes another author, forcing us to realize the meanings therein. Why a butterfly? Why not a dog, an elephant, a rat? Why not “Three afternoons in a row, I dreamed I was a cheese,” and even if that, what new meanings are trapped in this new and different sentence? We live our entire lives among the feathered wings of a beautiful, angelic (Engel-ish) language, a language that has as many possibilities on page as it does in speech, more now, more every day as meanings and use expand, as people experiment with new and different ways to put exact concepts, definitive feelings full of richness completely and totally in the mind of the reader.