Ask students to relax, clear their minds. Explain that you will slowly count to 100. Each time you say a new number, students should shift their eyes to look at something different. They may rest their gaze on anything. An object, or part of an object; a person, or part of a person; a shadow; the way light falls; a color; a pattern of leaves seen through the window; the shape of words or a single word on a page.
Questions to Consider
Immediately after the One Hundred Things exercise, free-write a description of the room you’re sitting in. Feel free to see more details as you write.
David Schanker
I.U.P.U.I.
Stand in front of the class with an empty Coca-Cola bottle, preferably a bottle of “Classic Coke,” with its distinctive hourglass shape and green-tinted glass. Ask the class to identify the object, and ask, “What does it mean to you?”
Students will respond with remarks like, “It’s something I like to drink,” “It rots your teeth,” or “It’s what I have for breakfast.” Ask the students why they drink it, and the discussion will move toward advertising, nutrition, or addiction, and someone may mention that the original Coca-Cola was made from the cocoa plant, the source of cocaine.
Ask the students about the images they associate with the Coke bottle, and the discussion will move toward nostalgia, holidays, Norman Rockwell paintings, the Super Bowl, dating rituals, product placement in movies.
Ask the students about the worldwide consumption of Coca-Cola, and the discussion will move toward the universal recognition of the Coca-Cola logo, the economic power of American industry, American “cultural imperialism,” and the colonization of the words’ stomachs by American foods like Coca-Cola and McDonalds. The discussion may turn toward religion—the quasi-religious iconography of corporate images like the Coke bottle. Or racism—the discriminatory employment practices of which the Coca-Cola company was accused.
Continue to prod the students to come up with stranger and more obscure associations with the Coke bottle. Pass the bottle around the class—the tactile physicality of the object may help stimulate the students’ creativity. Tell the students to think hard about the object; their heads may hurt, but that’s okay—the pain will subside. As the students come up with ideas, write them on the chalkboard, categorizing them (if it seems appropriate): physical, political, cultural, religious, personal, etc.
Ask the class to write a paragraph or two about a moment associated with the Coke bottle. Ask them to come up with a person or place or event connected to the Coke bottle by an association, however obscure. The Coke bottle need not even be mentioned. The variety of responses to this exercise has been amazing.
This exercise works well with all forms—poetry, fiction, dramatic writing, essays—and it has the added virtue of teaching something about the difference between original work and plagiarism.
Take a passage from a published piece and use it as a model. Have the students write an “imitation” of the passage they choose. Suggest that they stay close to the surface of the piece and not go too deeply. Use the piece as template for their own words: that is, where there’s an image, write an image. Where there’s a verb, use a verb. Where there’s a colorful adjective, write a colorful adjective.
As an example, the first sentence of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers,” might become: The last trip I took with my friend Jasper Jones he was happier with his new Kawasaki road bike than I’ve ever seen a man before or since.
“The trick with the imitation exercise is knowing when to let yourself go. In my sample sentence, I go off on my own after the motorcycle. I usually spend a fair amount of time talking this through with my students so that they understand how they can play in the tension between slavish imitation of form and completely going off on their own. The results of this exercise are always amazing to me. When they start with a template of well-written sentences (or lines of poetry) the substance seems to take care of itself. I encourage students to stay close to the form of the story or poem or essay as long as they can stand to, but then feel free to let go into their own forms. I often describe this as ‘holding onto the text as if by a string, but then let go once the pull toward your own forms becomes powerful enough to break the string.’
As a bonus, I usually throw in a demonstration of plagiarism. That is, we read aloud the “template” for the exercise and then we read aloud the exercise itself and I ask them to judge for me how close the writer is to plagiarism. The students are usually surprised to find that mostly they’re pretty far from plagiarism. I find that helping them define what plagiarism is not goes a long way toward helping them to define what plagiarism is.”
Hand students highway maps of various states (the wider the variety of states, the better) and ask them to search for names of towns that they find peculiar or intriguing. Every state has them—from Monkey’s Eyebrow, Kentucky to Yellow Jacket, Colorado.
Ask students to imagine what kind of people live there—not the real people who live there, but the people who might be there if the name of the town was pressed to its logical consequences. The folks in Monkey’s Eyebrow, for instance, might all be named Darwin, or keep eyebrows as fetishes. In Yellow Jacket, the people might be hostile, ill-tempered, buzzing with energy, addicted to sweets.
Once students have selected a town, their task is to write a poem about the town, with the town’s name as the title for the poem. The poem can be descriptive, “historical”, a dramatic monologue from one of the citizens; it can relate a stranger’s encounter with the town, or the founding of the town, or a special problem residents face. Anything that conveys the essence of the town itself, its strangeness, its wonder. The exercise can also include geographical features like lakes and mountains. Consider the possibilities in such locations as Loud Dam Pond, Hardwood Lake, Road’s End Farm (New Hampshire), The Book Cliffs (Utah).
The point of the exercise is that even the most ordinary texts, like maps, like the names of towns, participate in poetry because language use is inherently poetical—imagistic, metaphoric, and allusive.
“I have a hard time with the first person pronoun in my own poems, and I’ve had a fair amount of success getting things said that I needed to say, through a persona. My students are also often uncomfortable writing about themselves directly, and, when they do, they tend to fall back on a conventional voice that spouts cliches and platitudes. About halfway through the semester, we do this exercise.”
Look at several examples of “persona poems”: Philip Levine’s “Animals Are Passing from Our Lives,” Anne Sexton’s “The Moss of His Skin,” Katherine McMahan Aal’s “Hazel Tells Laverne” and at least one that came from this exercise, written by a former student. Talk about how the speaker’s identity and attitude are conveyed by the poem’s point of view and language, and what the poet who wrote the poem might have been trying to say for him/herself.
Bring to class two sets of notecards or slips of paper. One set should contain a variety of distinctive identities, such as “ballet dancer,” “slug,” or “cloistered nun.” The other set should contain various situations or life circumstances one might encounter: “wins the lottery,” “wishes on a star,” or “falls in love.” Students first select (at random) identities from one stack, then situations from the other. It is obviously best to choose dissonant items, because these challenge the students and also suggest wild possibilities. “nun” and “says a prayer,” for instance, would be an infelicitous pairing, and the student would be encouraged to choose again, hoping for something like “Sideshow Freak Falls in Love” or “Slug Wishes on a Star.”
After the selections are made, allow the students to share their unlikely identities, considering whose are the most outlandish. Before starting to write, work together to suggest vocabulary that the persona might use, words that would be natural or important to him/her. The in-class writing is just a starting point, mostly a way to encourage the students to start writing intuitively, without too much thought about what their persona “means” to say. The homework assignment is to write a persona poem—not necessarily the identity selected in class.
“For some students this exercise doesn’t result in a great poem, but it does result in a better sense of how the various masks we choose can shape the poem. It also emphasizes diction and the importance of voice in poetry. For other students, the exercise is a breakthrough experience: they succeed in saying something they recognize as important for themselves. Free for the first time from the burden of self-consciousness, they find their own voice.”
Two people who are involved/in love with the same person (they each know it, but they don't like it!)
Write the scene. What do they say to each other? What don't they say to each other? What is their body language like? They are not allowed to make any direct reference to the person with whom each is involved/in love.
The purpose of this exercise is to learn how to create tension through subtle nuances. Each knows who the other is, but neither will speak of the relationship.
“Among other things, this exercise teaches the power of small talk, silence, gesture, etc. in fiction. The trick is to get students to resist their easiest impulses to have a confrontation, or make the two people exchange little clever barbs or putdowns.
They will want to take into consideration the physical space in which the two people find each other. How might the two people behave on an elevator versus a plane? Teachers may also want to have students try different points of view. What happens if the scene is told from one person's point of view? What if it is in first person? What if it's in third? I prefer to give the exercise in third person, but one could also then assign it in first so that students have a chance to get inside the head of one of the characters.
This exercise also helps students imagine a lot "off screen." In other words, they as the writers need to know particulars about the two characters, the absent object of their affections, and the situation. But this information will not be explicit here. It may be alluded to, but this exercise is about when to reveal and when to conceal, and balancing the two.”
Discuss memories for fifteen minutes. Some questions to generate discussion:
Read from Joe Brainard’s I REMEMBER—a series of memories linked by association. (Download from Amazon.com. Make appropriate edits for age/material). Ask students to spend 6-10 minutes writing down memories as they arise in their minds. They may write as long on each as they wish and no longer, then onward.
Read aloud, comment on each other’s memories, the way they unfolded, the connections among them. Clarify that these personal, small events are fascinating, that these details are what all good fiction is built on, that there is no need to borrow from movies, TV and bad books when we all have THIS at our disposal
Our parents’ love story, happy or sad, is our first fairy tale, and fortunately or unfortunately, our own relationships are shaped by our parents’ relationship. Ask students to tell the story of how their parents met. The student writer might be a part of the story or not. He can take the ending as far as he wishes—ending in a birth, a divorce, or happily-ever-after. Basic who, what, where and how questions have to be addressed. Students should consider where these people are (in time and place), what they’re wearing, eating, saying. What music are they listening to? What’s going on in the news? Where are they working, etc. If the writer doesn’t know, make it up or look it up (research!). The stories that come from this exercise may turn out to be fiction or creative nonfiction, sometimes fiction, but they are almost always fascinating and very workable first drafts. (Sharon Olds’s poem “I Go Back to May 1937” is great for generating thoughts and discussion on this topic.)
40 HOSTAGES IN CHURCH TAKE UP COLLECTION, BUY CAPTOR’S GUN
Associated Press
HARRIETTA, Mich—A man taken into custody after holding about 40 members of a church congregation hostage before they took up a collection and brought his gun was undergoing psychiatric tests Monday, police said.
Gregory Rolland Danford, 30, of Harrietta was arrested Sunday at Harrietta Methodist Church about two hours after he walked into the small church carrying a deer rifle, said state police Sgt. John Erdody.
The man entered the church shortly after 9 a.m., Erdody said. After about 35 minutes, one church member talked the man into releasing him and his son, and they called state troopers.
Erdody said while troopers drove the fifteen miles from Cadillac to Harrietta, “One of the congregation got the suspect into talking about his gun, how much it cost, where he got it.
He then told them he paid $500 for it and one of the other congregation members stated she would buy it from him for the $500, to which he agreed,” Erdody said.
Church members took up a collection and got the $500 for the rifle, Erdody said.
Review the facts included in the newspaper article above, then write a summary of a short story that could be made from using the facts in some way. You may add to or subtract from the facts, but you may not change them. The idea must make sense, given the facts as presented in the news story. Feel free to imagine beyond the frame of the news story in exploring plot possibilities.
Answer the following questions in assessing and refining your story idea:
Whose story is this? Write a brief character profile of this person. In what way will the action of this story change his life? What do you learn about this situation from him/her that you wouldn’t have learned from anyone else’s point of view? How will this person’s identity/voice affect your use of language in the story?
What is the time frame of the story? (How much time is covered?) If the story is not chronological and/or if it involves multiple levels of time, how will the structure of the story accommodate this?
Plot outline: in a few sentences, describe the beginning, middle and end of the story. Briefly describe the scene that sets up the beginning, the “big scene” (pivotal moment), and the scene at the end.
Emotional outline: briefly describe the emotional state of the point of view character as he/she moves through the story.
Where does the tension lie? What or who causes it? Are there several kinds of tension at work? What are they?
What is the theme or “aboutness” of the story? What larger issues are reflected in the action of the story? For example: is the story about money, revenge, loss, divorce, etc. (Any of a million kinds of things.) Remember that you should be able to state a story’s “aboutness” in one sentence.
How would your story begin? Write the first line—or a first paragraph.
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