The Workshop Workout

As a student, I was never really a fan of writing exercises—they often seemed gimmicky or overly directed.  Only once did an exercise ever turn into an actual story. (On my desktop I titled the exercise “Stupid Ron” because I so resented having to do it—I have since spent quite a bit of time apologizing to my then teacher, the beloved Ron Carlson; the story that resulted was published in Glimmer Train, served as the writing sample for my now tenured job, and won me a $5000 grant from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, which I used to go to Bread Loaf.)  Despite that one success, when I became a teacher I remained suspicious of writing exercises; they seemed like an awfully convenient way to expend a chunk of class-time. But, mostly because my students say they value them, I have gradually come to use writing exercises in my workshops.  I still don’t do them (I don’t eat lima beans either, now that nobody can make me), but I’ve come to believe in their value.

The student-me was only ever assigned one kind of writing exercise, intended to inspire—to lead to the creation of new work.  And I have never really been short of ideas for new work.  But I’ve found that there are really three types of writing exercises; those intended for:

1.  inspiration
2.  exploration and revision
3.  fun

Inspiration exercises often work best for beginning students who haven’t discovered that they are allowed to write about all kinds of things.  For example, in my intro class this semester, I had the students brainstorm historical and current events that they’d like to write poems about.  This was a pretty surprising idea for many of them, even though they’d just read a host of poems about the Vietnam War.  In the intro class, I’ve come to depend on writing exercises as a way to get students away from more clichéd topics and styles—to break them of habits they were somehow born right into. 

Another favorite inspirational exercise is to have students write an A-Z story (Ron Carlson  again—from What If: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers)—a 26 sentence story in which the first word of every sentence has to start with the subsequent letter of the alphabet.  The exercise obliges students to vary their sentence structure and their vocabulary (though you do end up with a high percentage of stories with xylophones and zebras in them; I’m thinking of instituting a ban).

The second kind of exercise—exploration and revision exercises—have become my bread and butter.  I ask students of all levels to take a story (or essay or poem) they are working on and do the exercise with that particular piece in mind. For example, I might ask them to add a scene in which one character tells another a story.  Or write about a book a character is reading.  Or insert a flashback into your flashback, and then insert another flashback into that flashback.

Really all the students are doing is drafting, just with directions that take them away from the conventional, scene-heavy story structures that too many doses of show-don’t-tell have mired them in.  These revision exercises also get students to write scenes and sentences out of order, thus reminding them that a draft (of a story, an essay, a poem) does not need to be created in one fell-swoop, typed out from start to finish in a single caffeine-fueled computer session.

And then there’s the fun.  The surrealists liked to play their party games to free their minds, but sometimes fun is just fun, a break from writing toward a finished product.  Sometimes in class I say, just write something weird, as weird as you can get.  And then again sometimes fun fails.  I asked one class to do an assignment from Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More , a re-enactment of the scene from Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” in which the narrator places his hand over that of a blind man and helps the blind man draw a cathedral.  It was toward the end of the semester and my students all seemed to get along—never did I imagine that they’d be so reluctant to touch each other.  It didn’t turn out to be the fun artists-being-artists exercise I hoped for, but it did provide an unexpected lesson in just how intimate that last action of the story is.

Most of the time I make up exercises based on what my class is reading, but some other great sources are:

Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment just out from Paper Monument (glowing New York Times review here)

What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Ann Bernays and Pamela Painter

Now Write! Nonfiction edited by Sherry Ellis

The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell

Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer edited by Bret Anthony Johnston

Anyone else have any favorites?