May 10, 2014 by Ellen Orleans

Creating Atmosphere

May 10, 2014 Prompt #9

Here’s one of my favorite kids/science nerd jokes:

Q. Why did the restaurant on the moon go out of business?
A. Because it had no atmosphere!

Like a good restaurant, good writing needs atmosphere, which I loosely define as the mood, tone, or feel of the piece. What contributes to a work’s atmosphere? At least four elements (I’m sure there are more) including word choice, writing style, details and, what we’ll focus on here, setting.

Imagine, for instance, the same conversation in a noisy Chicago diner, a near-empty, small-town Laundromat, or inside a rattling blue truck on a foggy rural road. How would these different settings reinforce the conversation or play counterpoint to it?

Instructions

For this two-part writing exercise (more tomorrow), choose a location from the first list and a quality of light from the second list. If none of these choices inspire you, make up your own.

Location: kitchen • basement • attic • bedroom • den • sun room • living room • baby’s room • patio • driveway • hallway • laundry room

Quality of Light: dim • dusk • dark • filtered • blazing sun • gloomy • warm • cold • dawn • partly cloudy • glaring

With your location and quality of light chosen (for instance, dawn on the driveway), write your phrase on a fresh piece of paper. Write for 10 minutes, setting the physical scene.

Tips for Creating a Memorable Setting

Include specifics. Is a car parked on the driveway? Does a child’s bike lie on its side? Has a recent rain washed away half a chalk drawing? Is there a long crack in the drive, always meant to be repaired?
Include sensory details. What color is the sky? Is the driveway cool or hot? Do blooming lilacs scent the air? Or is it the smell of garage, not picked up for weeks.
How does your location and quality of light work together to set the tone?
Don’t include characters, actions or dialogue yet. Focus on the setting the mood.

How This Prompt Can Strengthen Your Writing

Encourages you to observe and imagine as you combine elements.
Creating a strong setting adds complexity and layers to your writing.

Further Writing and Considerations

Choose a different location and quality of light.
Choose the same location, but a different quality of light.
Choose the same quality of light, but a different location.
Does the style of your writing change depending upon the setting your choose?

Variations for Writing Groups

On index cards, each member writes down a location and kind of light. Or choose another variable, such as time of day, season, or weather. (Just don’t start with “It was a dark and stormy night.”)
Put the index cards in two piles.
Each member chooses one card from each pile and writes for 15 minutes.
If possible, have members share their work. Listen for a sentence or phrase that impressed or puzzled you. Write it on the top of a fresh sheet of paper.
Write in response to it for 15 more minutes.

May 9, 2014 by Ellen Orleans

Paint Chip Poetry

May 9, 2014 Prompt #8

Preparation For today’s prompt, we’ll use the paint chips mentioned in the May 4th blog entry. If you haven’t already procured paint chips, try this prompt once you’ve gotten them or cut up three of more squares of different colors from magazines or catalogs.While paint chip hunting, try to find paint chips with interesting names (such as Lost Lake Blue or Summer Time Yellow). Choose 3 or 4 samples and take them home.

Instructions I’ve used this exercise many times in my writing classes. It’s usually a big hit with elementary school kids who often write startling profound stories about their colors. If you have children or other young people in your life, try it with them.

From your paint chips, choose a color that particularly attracts or repels you.
Looking at your color, answer these questions.

If this color was a verb, what would it be?
If this color was an emotion, what would it be?
If this color was a person or an animal, who or what would it be?

For instance, if your color is Sea Green, you might write “wander,” “bored” and “mermaid” (which technically is neither a person or animal, but you have creative license.).

3. Write a sentence using your three words, such as “Sea Green is a bored mermaid, wandering the ocean in search of something new.”
4. Use that sentence as an opening line for a poem or story. The style of writing is up to you. Write for ten minutes.

How This Prompt Can Strengthen Your Writing

Encourages you to link the visual with written language.
Helps you make connections between seemingly unrelated concepts (color, verbs, emotions, animals.)

Further Writing

Focus on just one of the questions above. For instance, if Sea Green conjures wandering, write for ten minutes about wandering.
Choose a second color and repeat the steps above.
Choose the same color, then choose a new verb, emotion, and person or animal.

Variations for Writing Groups

Ask everyone in the group to bring in two or more paint chips. Put them in the middle of your table. Everyone chooses one for the exercise.
Ask everyone write about the same color. Afterwards, read your writing aloud. Listen for differences and overlaps. What surprised you?

Looking ahead: Hold on to your paint chips. We’ll use them again in the weeks to come.

May 8, 2014 by Ellen Orleans

Two Truths and a Lie

May 8, 2014 Prompt #7

Creative Falsehoods and Other Ways to Stretch Your Imagination

Perhaps you’ve played “Two Truths and A Lie” as an ice breaker in school, at work, or with friends. This prompt expands on this “get-to-know-you” game.

Instructions

On a blank piece of paper, write three sentences about yourself, your family or a character you are writing about. Two must be true. One must be a lie. Here is an example:

When I was four, my favorite toy was a ring of keys that my grandfather gave me.
When I was thirteen, my grandmother moved back to New Jersey where I lived.
When my brother Sam was eleven, he had a Halloween party that altered his life.

Next, write one of these sentences each on the top of three blank sheets of paper. Continue to write out the story (real or imagined). Write for 3 to 5 minutes per sheet of paper. Here’s an example of how I followed up:

When I was four, my favorite toy was a ring of keys my grandfather gave me. I carried them everywhere. I played with them when I was bored. I shook them when I wanted attention. I put them under my pillow at night. It wasn’t until I was six that I even understood that keys unlocked doors.

When I was thirteen, my grandmother moved back to New Jersey where I lived. Turns out, she was nothing like grandmothers in books. She didn’t bake cookies or wear an apron. She played Bridge and drank Scotch at 5 o’clock every day. Her refrigerator was sparse: a half-carton of eggs, a jar of creamed herring. Half-size cans of Michelob beer lined the refrigerator door. She told me she could never finish a whole one.

When my brother Sam was eleven, he had a Halloween party. We decorated the basement with orange balloons and black crepe paper. We taped huge sheets of Kraft Paper on the wall so his friends could write graffiti on it. At first they wrote things like Boo! and Watch out for black cats. Soon they got mean and wrote Jojo smells and Meryl is a witch. Then: Sam is queer. After that party, nothing was the same. Sam wondered how they knew.

How “Two Truths and A Lie” Strengthens Your Writing

It encourages your imagination and asks you to dig deeper with your writing
It highlights the gray area between truth and lies, fiction and non-fiction.

Next Steps for More Writing

Re-read your “truth” stories and circle a word or phrase that still holds a charge—disturbing, melancholy, or particularly sweet. Write that phrase at the top of a new sheet of paper and write in response to it for 10 minutes.
Re-read your “lie” and circle a phrase that contains a slice of truth. Or circle a phrase that, again, holds a charge—wistful, exciting, or speaking to an unnamed desire. Write that phrase on a new sheet of paper and write in response to it for 10 minutes.

Tips and Variations for Writing Groups

After you write your three short paragraphs, read them aloud to each other. Guess which is the lie and talk about why you thought so. Discuss if the “lies” have a different writing style than the “truths.”
Write a piece based on one of the other members lies.

Reminder

For a prompt later this week, find an old postcard. If you don’t have one, check antique shops or tourist shops. Or, type the phrase “old travel postcards” into Google’s image search or another search engine and choose one from there.

May 7, 2014 by Ellen Orleans

Keeping A Writer’s Notebook

May 7, 2014 Prompt #6

Today’s prompt takes a different slant, one in which you create your own list of writing springboards inspired by daily life.

Getting Started

Find or buy a notebook small enough to carry with you in a bag, briefcase, or even a coat pocket.
As you go through your day, pay attention to the world around you. When something strikes you as memorable, puzzling, funny, or beautiful, write it down.
Once a week, sit down with your notebook, choose something you have written (The white boy with the yellow sweater and blue hair. The squeal of the braking train = childhood dog, Barky.) and rewrite it on the top of a fresh sheet of paper. Write about it for 10 minutes.

Ideas for Inspiration

Eavesdrop (politely) on public conversions. Listen to children.
Write down expressions or turns of phrases that catch your attention.
Look at the clothes of people around you. Look at buildings and trees. Look at the sky.
Take a different route to work. What surprises you? Write it down.
Traveling on a train? Close your eyes for a few moments, then write what you hear.

Three More Thoughts

When note taking, don’t worry about the quality of writing or where the observation might lead. Simply scribble away!
Set context. Some writers like to include background to help them remember where and why they wrote a note. “Rhinestone collar on a French bulldog” might be memorable three months later, but “small dog barking” might not. Consider adding place and date to your notes if you find that helpful.
Don’t use your writer’s notebook for phone numbers, appointments, or to do lists. This is your sacred writer’s space!

Electronic Writer’s Notebook?

In general, I don’t like using my iPhone as a writer’s notebook. Why?

When I open the Notes app to type something in, I’m usually distracted by email or find myself checking Facebook posts.
When I’m at a reading or lecture and write something in my Writer’s Notebook, I look scholarly. If I type it into my phone, it appears as if I’m not paying attention.

However, if electronic note-taking works for you, go for it.

How Keeping A Writer’s Notebook Strengthens Your Writing

It encourages you to be more observant (and perhaps, more engaged) in the world.
It stirs your brain.
It creates a treasure chest of prompts that you can use to inspire your writing.

Next Steps for More Writing

Sketch in your notebook. Later, write about what you drew. How does drawing feel different than writing?
Cut and Paste! For example, cut out quotes from magazines and headlines from newspapers. Paste in fortunes from fortune cookies and tags from tea bags. Later, use one of these quotes as the starting point for a 10-minute writing exercise.

Tips and Variations for Writing Groups

Start your group with each member reading out loud one note from their writer’s notebook.
Swap observations. On a note card, write down one observation from your notebook (The clouds reflect pink in the high windows. My dead aunt’s perfume lives on in the doctor’s waiting room.) Put all the observations in the middle of the table. Each writer chooses an observation that is not their own as a prompt. Write for 15 minutes.

Looking Ahead

May 6, 2014 by Ellen Orleans

Imagined History of a Lost Object

May 6, 2014 Prompt #5

Before Getting Started: Pen or Keyboard?

Before I launch today’s prompt, I want to talk about writing vs. typing. Through out this blog, you’ll see instructions such as “Write the phrase on a fresh piece of paper” Which raises a question my students frequently ask: “Is it better to write on a computer or on paper?”

I answer their question with another question: “What works better for you?”

For me, writing prompts and first drafts of creative work begin best with paper and pen. If I’m diving into something new or feel stuck on a particular part of a story, writing on paper lets me to follow tangents, explore voice, mess up, try again, and imagine furiously. And why not? I’ll be revising it anyway when I type it into Word or Pages on my laptop or iPad. I’ll often set a timer for 15 minutes then take off writing. Setting a time limit says: Even if the writing is frustrating and painful, it is only frustrating and painful for fifteen minutes. I can survive that.

When I’m writing non-fiction such as this blog, however, I type it in directly. Must be a different part of my brain.

Pen and paper for first drafts and prompts don’t’t work for everyone. Some writers say they write more quickly and effectively on their computer. One student said she couldn’t read her own handwriting when it was time to revise her work! Other writers like the organization that a computer offers.

If you do use a computer, watch out for these traps:

Don’t edit or proofread as you write. Keep typing!
Don’t get distracted. There are a thousand ways to procrastinate on a computer; for this reason, I use a software program called Freedom that prevents me from getting on-line while writing. I set it for 30 minutes or an hour to help me stay focused. When I use it, I don’t get tempted by Facebook or YouTube and I can’t get lost researching, for instance, what songs were on the Top Ten in January 1972 or from what material the parchment of a Torah scroll is made. (Both legitimate questions for the book I’m writing, but it’s better for me to separate writing and research, especially in early drafts.) Even with Freedom, I can still distract myself by organizing my photos or clearing out my email in-box. Self-discipline is a skill for sure.

Today’s Prompt

Today’s prompt is inspired by the poem “1943 Steel Penny” by Tom Chandler (below). In it, he writes a compelling history of a steel penny, using specific details of time, place, and even brand names.

1943 Steel Penny

Spent more than a month
in a torn khaki pocket
slumped in a ditch in Anzio,
four years in a jar
in a workingman’s bar
near a highway
somewhere in Michigan,
more than two decades
in a Phillies Cigar Box
lost in your great uncle’s
underwear drawer
after he’d found it
in a local garage
on the floor near the wall
where a calendar hung
with some dates crossed off
and other dates circled
where he’d gone for repair
on a meaningless Thursday
wearing a tie in the fresh morning light,
smelling of brylcream & smoker’s breath
and worried about his Desoto.

“1943 Steel Penny” by Tom Chandler, from Wingbones. © Signal Books Signature Poets series.

Preparation

For this prompt, you’ll need to choose your own old object to write about it. It could be a coin, as in the poem, or it could be, for instance, a chess piece, hat, book, hammer, button, ring, spool of thread, or box of fishing tackle. Choose what inspires you, but try to find something at least 20 years old. Older is better! However, if you can’t find an old object or are writing somewhere away from your things, use what is in your pocket, in your bag, in the gutter of the street.