It is the little things

I’m going to practice seeing the little things all this week.

For example, have you ever noticed what it’s like to walk into your room and be met with the smell of fresh air and budding flowers coming through your window?

To see the white curtain billow ever so slightly as if it’s happy to see you?

What do you do in that moment? How do you respond?

 I smile.

No new exercises

I haven’t tried any new exercises. I actually stopped experimenting with fiction all together.

The world is too much with me.  Well, Wordsworth probably wasn’t thinking about my writing aspirations when he wrote that, but you know what I mean.

Things do get in the way when you’re trying to create.

How do those weekend writers do it? On the weekends I play catch up on work I didn’t do during the week.

Just in case you have time for a poem, take a look: The World is Too Much With Us.

Art Edwards' “U Method”

My main character is too nice, so I tried Art Edwards' “U Method.”

Here’s how he describes it: “…character’s traits fall somewhere on the U’s arms…likable traits fall along the right arm, unlikable traits along the left.”

So I tried to “plot” my character’s traits and I realized the obvious, she didn’t have many faults.

So now I’m working on the left side of the arm. I think my character will have the following:

Unlikable Traits—She’s a know-it-all, smart alec

Very Unlikable— desperate when it comes to relationships, niave

Wait, this character sounds like a cliche. I have to think about this some more.

See Art Edwards, "The Key to Complex Characters," The Writer, Jan. 2012, p13 for more details.

This Exercise Might Help You

As you know, I’ve been trying to jumpstart a piece I began in the summer. I found this exercise and it actually helped.

It might work for you, too.

It only takes about ten minutes, but you can adjust the time, up or down.

“Keeping Time” is the name of the exercise. All you have to do is look at the clock and write down the time. Next, you start a dialog using the time you wrote down.

Here’s how I started: It’s 7:00am, T, why is your alarm on?

Before I knew it, Kia (my main character) had made a discovery about her roommate (T) that I wasn’t even aware of.

I was so happy with the results, I tried it again.

This time I created a brief scene (Kia goes to her friend’s dorm room) and put the time dialog in her friend’s mouth.

As I wrote, I learned Kia was being stood up.

Who knows what, if anything, I’ll do with the scenes I wrote.

The good thing is that this exercise relieved me from being stuck.

Yay! I got something on paper.

The exercise described above can be found in
Please let me know if it works for you. If you improve on the idea, please let me know that, too.

Try this Writing Exercise

Children's book author, Claudia Mills says she uses pen and paper to write. 

Yes, you heard me correctly. (I do, too, but I chastise myself for it because it doesn‘t seem efficient.)

Back to Mills, she sits down with a topic in mind and freewrites about what she remembers experiencing and feeling about that topic. 

She also writes memories about how her children dealt with her topic or issue. I’m going to try this more. I started a novel in a writing class a few months ago, and I tried to do this.

I tried to recall college. 

I was able to remember enough to get a few chapters done. Maybe I can write a novella this way.

Try it! Take out pen and paper and just jot down what you remember about your topic.

Source: Claudia Mills' “The Author’s Perspective” in Handbook of Research on Children's and Young Adult Literature By Shelby Anne Wolf, Karen Coats, Christine A. Jenkins

Go on a marathon!

Here is a writing exercise you can try with a small group of family, friends, and/or associates, or alone (Hey, it worked for Ernest Hemingway.): It’s called a writing marathon.

No, you don’t have to run anywhere. 

I thought that too at first and I said, “No way am I doing this exercise.”

So what’s a writing marathon? 

It comes from Natalie Goldberg’s *Writing Down the Bones.

It’s the idea of going to a restaurant, bar, bakery, cemetery, or anywhere else you want to go and just write. You might sit for 20 minutes or so and just let your fingers record what you see, hear, think, smell, and so on.

If you’re working on a particular topic, let’s say a research paper on Egyptian mythology, put the topic at the top of your page and go. Write!

After 20 minutes or so whether you’re with a group or alone, read what you wrote.

Don’t judge it. Just read it.

After everyone shares or you read to yourself, circle an interesting phrase and consider putting it at the top of your page and write for twenty more minutes—but in another setting.

That’s right. Leave the restaurant, bar, bakery, cemetery, or wherever, and go to the one next door or a few blocks down. The atmosphere will be different. 

Don’t have an interesting phrase?

That’s OK. Keep writing anyway.

*Take a look at the slideshow above and you will see a copy of this book.

Photo Source:
By Ch. Pagenkopf (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons