Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Exercising
As perhaps written earlier in this space, Adair Lara's book nearly fell off the shelf into my hands at the Barnes and Noble store in Johnson City. When I purchased it, much against my better judgement, since we were packing far too many books to move to SF, even after selling and giving away hundreds, i had no idea she was SF-based, so when I finished it, and adored it, and THEN saw she was not only based in SF, but was a much-beloved writer for the Chronicle for years , I figured it had to be fate...beshert , in Yiddish, as my mother was so fond of referring to...and so I emailed her quickly, requesting a place in her workshops...after sending her some prose (from this blog, in fact), she asked me to join her January groups, and so I was in...and now AM in...and am glad. It's a great focus for me.A genuine learning time.
Before we all met, mid-January, she sent out some pre-workshop writing exercises she asked us to pick three of, covering such ideas as : write about the history of your hair....write about your father's clothes....write about a rental you've had....write about what's in your closet....stuff like that..provocative ideas to get us kick-started....and i could hardly wait.
I chose for y first exercise a thing where she asked that we start writing about a topic we had in mind, using this sentence fragment: "And another thing that can be said about this topic is...." and then complete that sentence, moving on from there to see where it leads. Then after a page or so of that, beginning the next section on the same topic with this fragment: " What I am NOT going to write about this topic is..." and see where that takes you. That is very interesting because it turns your mind around and makes you examine the story or essay idea from the entire other side.
Before we all met, mid-January, she sent out some pre-workshop writing exercises she asked us to pick three of, covering such ideas as : write about the history of your hair....write about your father's clothes....write about a rental you've had....write about what's in your closet....stuff like that..provocative ideas to get us kick-started....and i could hardly wait.
I chose for y first exercise a thing where she asked that we start writing about a topic we had in mind, using this sentence fragment: "And another thing that can be said about this topic is...." and then complete that sentence, moving on from there to see where it leads. Then after a page or so of that, beginning the next section on the same topic with this fragment: " What I am NOT going to write about this topic is..." and see where that takes you. That is very interesting because it turns your mind around and makes you examine the story or essay idea from the entire other side.
Labels: SF Writing
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