This week involved reusing pieces we’d written in previous weeks in different ways, which I enjoyed greatly. I even felt good enough about all three of my pieces to read them in the group.
The first was a quick warm-up for 5 minutes. We were instructed to flip through our previously-written pieces in our notebooks, semi-randomly choose a page, and write down the last line on that page on a slip of paper. We then passed the slip of paper to the person on our left and the paper we received became the first line of our piece. The person next to me gave me an amazing line to work with.
prompt: Stop breathing breath of fire - breathe breath of clouds
Stop breathing breath of fire - breathe breath of clouds. Breath of wind and effervescent rain, of the distillation of the heavens .
Take a moment, a heartbeat. Think. Be. You are a thing of the stars, borne of the primal ingredients of the universe, and no boundaries can hold you.
For the next exercise, Robyn spread out a couple dozen pictures — almost all of which featured the ocean in some way — and we spent time poring over the various scenes depicted. She then played a soundscape of ocean sounds and instructed us to pick out any picture that particularly spoke to us. She also gave us two prompts if we wanted to use either one. We had 10 minutes for this exercise.
The picture I ended up using was a shot that looked like it was taken from the Seaside Promenade looking south toward the promontory, with the ocean only barely visible past the dunes at the right edge of the photo. The sky was overcast with low clouds, there were only a few people on the Promenade, and in the middle distance, a girl or woman in jeans, sweater, and vest was running toward the water.
prompts: when the tide came in on the horizon
She could see something just over the low, grassy dunes. Something that wasn’t right, though she couldn’t make it out from this vantage. It looked like a hill, but smooth and dark, no grass. And anyway, there was only sandy beach over there, no hills, dark or otherwise.
She glanced at the others walking the Promenade with her. None seemed to notice, everyone talking to each other or looking straight ahead instead of at the sea. Sharp wind prickled her face with blown sand, as if to discourage her from investigating. Probably nothing, she thought.
It moved. The hill…moved. She vaulted over the stone balustrade, stumbling as her feet hit the unstable sand. And then she was running and shouting for someone — anyone — to come, to help.
Figures, she thought. The first time I see a whale and it’s going to be a dead one on a beach.
For the last exercise, we picked a previous piece and picked out words or phrases that struck us in some way to form a kind of free-form poem. The poem part wasn’t the exercise, only a step. The idea was to then rework the piece by recycling it into something else entirely using the words we’d pulled out. What was interesting about the exercise was how pulling out certain words could form an entirely different theme or tone than the original piece had, or create a completely different story altogether.
We were given 20 minutes to put together the free form poem part that would become our prompt, and then write the piece itself. And although I loved how mine came out and that it was unquestionably the best one I did all evening, it’s too private to share here, unfortunately. So instead, I’m posting the words I pulled out in a free form poem that became the prompt for my piece.
The original piece I worked from was this one from week 3:
She hates coffee. Always has. Hates not just the taste, but the smell. Sacreligious in a city so reverent about its coffee roasts. Almost tragic, since he is a connoisseur of such things, and it’s a pleasure they can’t share.
But on the rainy mornings when the clouds sit so low that it’s hard to tell whether it’s the beginning of the day or the end, she loves the smell of coffee wafting from the kitchen the most.
It means he will be there, singing tunes from old musicals while he makes oatmeal — or perhaps, if she’s lucky the pancake recipe he created just for her — and their day will start slow and lazy and comforting. She will pad through the rain darkened house, all blue and gray, heading for that cheery yellow rectangle cast through the kitchen door, moving toward that light from death to life. Guided by the light, by the sound of his voice, and by the smell of coffee.
And this is what I pulled out to create a prompt poem (poem prompt?):
sacriligious
almost tragic
a pleasure they can’t share
whether it’s the beginning of the day or the end
rain-darkened house
cheery yellow rectangle
moving toward the light
from death to life
guided by the light
Saturday, July 20, 2013 at 2:28 PM | Imagination doesn’t just mean making things up. It means thinking things through, solving them, or hoping to do so, and being just distant enough to be able to laugh at things that are normally painful. Head teachers would call this escapism, but they would be entirely wrong. I would call fantasy the most serious, and the most useful, branch of writing there is. And this is why I don’t, and never would, write Real Books.
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