Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Writing Experiments 1 - Four simple exercises to build your skills

Most writers run across challenges in their work all the time. Characters who won't cooperate. Scenes that refuse to resolve. Ideas and situations that require research. Themes that cut too close to the bone.

Nonetheless, to reach your full potential, deliberate experimentation may be needed. It's common to play around with exercises earlier in your writing career, but this can be invaluable to writers at all levels. In fact, it may be more helpful to set aside time to break away from familiar work and take on an exercise after the basics of craft have been learned.

A good place to start, is simply to take a scene you've written and rewrite it from a different point of view. Consider, for instance, a first kiss scene in a romance. If it is written from the perspective of the heroine, redoing it from the hero's point of view will provide insights on the characters and their relationship even if the rewrite never makes its way into the final manuscript.

In addition, that specific example shifts from writing in a female point of view to a male point of view. That sort of experiment can push a writer into an uncomfortable place if he or she has never written from the perspective of the opposite sex. In writing experiments, the degree of difficulty is usually a good measure of how much might be learned.

Another experiment is to write with the voice of a published author. This is generally more difficult than changing points of view. In my case, I was introduced to this exercise while in high school. I had to write out three scenes from Tolkien in longhand. One was the original, and two were created by me in the voice of the author. The next step was to hand pages around and see which ones other students identified as being the original scenes. In my case, my fake pages fooled all the other students. (That's when I began to suspect I was a writer.)

Note: This exercise does not have to be a recasting of a published scene. It can be something of your own, just written in someone else's voice. And, unless it's parody, these pages are for your work notebook, not for publication.

When you write in the voice of another author, you learn techniques and skills and rhythms and you build a sensitivity to vocabulary that can shape your own writing.

Still harder for most people is to create variations. The way to do this is to come up with 3 to 5 approaches to a writing task. I often will move from the logline I've created for a work to distinct ways to begin it. I always discover something unexpected and find my way to a better approach by doing this.

Note: this does not have to be restricted to the beginning of a long work. It's possible to write the equivalent of a logline for a chapter or even the scene. From that, creating variations works the same way.

For instance, your protagonist might need to have a repair done to his or her car while traveling on a long trip. The purpose of a scene might be to prevent the protagonist from leaving right away. This could be accomplished by discovering parts aren't available or the mechanic is antagonistic or their credit card has been canceled. Writing out these scenes where the protagonist must learn about the obstacle and respond to it can push your creative abilities and build your knowledge of the work itself.

I'll end with one of the easier experiments. This is simply to write the next scene in your story either by only using dialogue or by only using description. Essentially, this means creating a radio version or a silent movie version. (I understand this is a standard exercise for some film school classes.) Either approach will force a reassessment of how the purpose of such a scene might be accomplished. These versions (if you choose to do both) will differ in interesting ways. Chances are, each will force the exercise of new writing muscles. And one is likely to be more difficult and provide a better learning experience.

Next time, I'll look at some more challenging experiments and discuss what value they might provide.

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