Recently, I was digging through my old teaching and graduate school papers in an attempt to purge and condense into something a bit more useful than several boxes and files of random completed assignments and saved teaching materials recently, and I rediscovered an exercise I created for one of my graduate classes as a teaching demo. Since I made the long ago promise that this blog might have creative writing prompts in it and have never yet kept that promise, here you go!
I modified this exercise from Brian Kiteley’s The 3 A. M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction (page 177) by adding a few more options and citing the first lines where I could. I added number 3 from Schönwerth’s new fairy tale collection, cited number 4, added number 6 and 11 from The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, added number 14 from Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, and I added number 15 from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. I added these to the list because I felt that the list included in 3 A.M. Epiphany could use a bit more expanding of fiction sub-genres and a broadening of cultural influences.
Exercise 1: Beginnings
The goal of this exercise is to take the pressure off starting (which is sometimes the hardest part) and ask you to start somewhere you might never think to start on your own. The first stages of writing are often about risk-taking, writing toward fear, and losing control.
Instructions: Start a story with one of the following as your opening sentence. Let the sentence influence the trajectory of your story in whatever ways entice you. However, you are not required to continue the style or make the pivotal action of the sentence the focus of your story as you move forward. Let the sentence be your place to begin and then keep your hand moving.
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs before she saw him.
What I’m saying right now is a lie.
There were once two young women, one pretty, the other plain, and they spent their days in the fields sowing flaxseeds. (Schönwerth)
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. (Jeremy Bentham)
There was a man she loved with a violent love, and she spent much of her time thinking about his wife. (Joyce Carol Oates)
She was a girlygirl and they were true men, the lords of creation, but she pitted her wits against them and she won. (Cordwainer Smith)
Like all men of – , I have been a leader; like all, I have been a slave (Jorge Luis Borges)
Truth, like morality, is a relative affair: there are no facts, only interpretations.
Every morning there is a halo hanging on the corner of my girlfriend’s four-post bed. (Sugar Ray)
One hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. (Ernest Hemingway)
Square in the middle of the San Diego Freeway, I leaned back against a huge twisted oak. (Larry Niven)
She said, I know what it’s like to be dead (John Lennon and Paul McCartney)
They shoot the white girl first. (Toni Morrison)
La Loca was only three years old when she died. (Ana Castillo)
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. (Zora Neale Hurston)
Exercise 2: Repetition
The goal of exercise 2 is to activate the associative side of the brain, elevate your attention to diction and the crafting of language and sound at the sentence level, and mix up your natural tendencies regarding comfortable sentence structure. My hope is to shift your attention toward sound and the prosody of language by employing repetition of important, meaning-laden words and the attempt to weave those words in and out of each sentence.
Instructions: Take your favorite sentence from what you wrote in exercise 1. Using this as your first line, start writing a short story in which each sentence has one meaningful word from the previous sentence repeated. Try not to use “the” or “its” as the only repeated word.
My attempts at each exercise:
Exercise 1: There was a man she loved with a violent love, and she spent much of her time thinking about his wife. His wife was dead, and all she dreamed of was putting on the clothes she once wore that were boxed away, but not given away, and tucked into a closet that no one opens. She never brought up the filled closet at dinner, or afterward, or at breakfast over coffee. The knowledge hovered in the silence between them. Sometimes, this knowledge threatens to consume her. She feels the flood of it coming when she’s making coffee where the woman must have stood to make coffee, when she’s standing at the bathroom mirror examining her face before bed, when she clicks off the bedside lamp that was there when she joined him in bed that first night and all nights since.
Exercise 2: She feels the flood of this knowledge coming when she’s making coffee where the woman must have stood to make coffee, when she’s standing at the bathroom mirror examining her face before bed, when she clicks off the bedside lamp that was there when she joined him in bed that first night together and all nights since. That first night she had not known about the wife. The wife had been a secret, or something so small in her husband’s mind that it went unmentioned until almost a year in. In the kitchen as he mixed cocktails for them she’d complimented his taste in décor – that his house was simply beautiful. He laughed and said ‘that’s all my wife’ before tasting a bit of the cocktail. All my wife. ‘Wife?’ she finally whispered. Finally, he realized, must have realized, he’d been keeping her life and death a secret.