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coloredinkI have a copy of a very useful book called Steering the Craft, by Ursula K. LeGuin, who's one of my favorite authors. The exercises in this book helped break me out of a rut--and they're useful exercises even if you're not suffering from a dry spell--so I thought I'd type them up to share.
The exercises are meant to be used after reading the chapter/discussion, but I'm not going to type up the whole bleeding book, so I'm afraid you'll have to take what you can get. I'll list the examples LeGuin gave, though, so that if you're really industrious you can look them up. She also suggests specific plots/ideas/settings, in case you can't think of something to write your exercise around.
CHAPTER ONE: THE SOUND OF YOUR WRITING
(ex: Gertrude Stein, "Susie Asado"; Rudyard Kipling, "How the Whale Got His Throat"; Mark Twain, from "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County")
Exercise One: Being Gorgeous
Write a paragraph to a page (150-300 words) of narrative that's meant to be read out aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect--any kind of sound effect you like--but NOT rhyme or meter.
Suggestions: climax of a ghost story, an invented fantasy island
-----
CHAPTER TWO: PUNCTUATION
(no examples)
Exercise Two: I Am Garcia Marquez
Write a paragraph to a page (150-350 words) of narrative with no punctuation (and no paragraphs or other breaking devices)
Suggestions: A group of people engaged in a hurried or hectic activity, such as a revolution or the first few minutes of a one-day sale
-----
CHAPTER THREE: SENTENCE LENGTH AND COMPLEX SYNTAX
(ex: Jane Austen, from Mansfeld Park; Harriet Beecher Stowe, from Uncle Tom's Cabin; Mark Twain, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Virginia Woolf, from "Time Passes" in To the Lighthouse)
Note from me: These are all examples of long sentences, or mixed long and short; LeGuin gives no examples of short-sentence writing style and actually seems to have a personal distaste for it. I would give Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as an example of effective short sentences.
Exercise Three: Short and Long
Part One: Write a paragraph, 100-150 words, in sentences of seven or fewer words. No sentence fragments! Each sentence must have a subject and a verb.
Part Two: Write a half-page to a page of narrative, up to 350 words, which is all one sentence.
Suggestions: For Part One, some kind of tense, intense action, like a thief entering a room where someone is sleeping. For Part Two, try a powerful, gathering emotion sweeping in a lot of characters, like a family memory or a key moment at the dinner table or by a hospital bed.
Optional revisits to Exercise Three:
Part One: If you wrote the exercise the first time in an authorial or formal voice, try the same or a different subject in a colloquial, even a dialect voice--perhaps a character talking to another character. If you did it colloquially to start with, back off a little and try a more detached, authorial mode.
Part Two: If your long sentence of syntactically simple, connected mainly with ands or semicolons, try one with some fancy clauses and stuff--show Henry James how. If you already did that, try a more "torrential" mode, using ands, dashes, etc.--let it pour out!
Both Parts: If you told two different stories in the two different sentence lengths, you might try telling the same story in both, and see what happens to the story.
-----
CHAPTER FOUR: REPETITION
(ex: "The Thunder Badger" from Marsden, Northern Paiute Language of Oregon, a word-by-word translation, slightly adapted by U.K.L.)
Exercise Four: Again and Again and Again
Part One: Verbal Repetition
Write a paragraph of narrative (150 words) that includes at least three repetitions of a noun, verb, or adjective (a noticeable word, not an invisible one like "was," "said," "did"). This exercise can easily be done as a group as in-class writing. (If you read it aloud, don't tell people what the repeated word is; do they hear it?)
Part Two: Syntactic Repetition
Write a paragraph to a page of narrative (200-400 words) in which you deliberately repeat the syntactical construction, or the exact rhythm, of a phrase or sentence (or more than one) several times.
(She goes on to give a rather lengthy example that I won't type up here, but I will in a comment if anyone asks.)
Part Three: Structural Repetition
Write a short narrative (350-1000 words) in which something is said or done, and then something is said or done that echoes or repeats it, perhaps in a different context, or by different people, or on a different scale. This can be a complete story, if you like, or a fragment of narrative.
Any two parts of this exercise, or all three, may be combined into one.
-----
CHAPTER FIVE: ADJECTIVE AND ADVERB
(ex: none)
Exercise Five: Chastity
Write a paragraph to a page (200-350 words) of descriptive narrative prose without adjectives or adverbs. No dialogue. The point is to give a vivid description of a scene or action using only verbs, nouns, pronouns, and articles. Adverbs of time (then, next, later, etc.) may be necessary, but be sparing. Be chaste.
If you're using this book in a group, I recommend that you do this exercise at home, because it may take a while. If you're currently working on a longer piece, you might want to try writing the next paragraph or page of it as this exercise.
The first time you do the exercise, write something new. After that you might want to try "chastening" a passage you've already written. It can be interesting.
(Note: LeGuin apparently devised this exercise on her own when she was 14 or 15 years old. This is why she's more amazing than me, because this is easily the hardest writing exercise I've ever done.)
-----
At this point my book is missing chapter six and instead reprinted chapters four and five. Boy, I sure am glad I bought this book for 50 cents off a book cart.
-----
CHAPTER SEVEN: POINT OF VIEW AND VOICE
(ex: LeGuin demonstrates first person, limited third person, and two types of omniscient third, which she labels "omniscient author" and "detached author." I won't type up the examples here, because that would basically involve typing up the whole chapter, but I can go into them in the comments.)
Exercise Seven: POV
Think up a situation for a narrative sketch of 200-350 words. It can be anything you like, but should involve several people doing something. (Several means more than two. More than three will be useful.) It doesn't have to be a big, important event, though it can be; but something should happen, even if only a cart-tangle at the supermarket, a wrangle around the table concerning the family division of labor, or a minor street-accident. . .
Please use little to no dialogue in these POV exercises. While the characters talk, their voices cover the POV, and so you're not exploring that voice, which is the point of the exercise.
Part One: Two Voices
First: Tell your little story from a single POV--that if a participant in the event--an old man, a child, a cat, whatever you like. Use limited third person. Second: Retell the same story from the POV of one of the other people involve in it. Again, use limited third person,
As we go on into the next parts of this exercise, if your little scene or situation or story runs dry, invent another one along the same lines. But if the original one seems to keep turning up new possibilities in different voices, just go on exploring them through it. That will be the most useful, informative way to do the exercise.
Part Two: Detached Narrator
Tell the same story using the detached author or "fly on the wall" POV.
Part Three: Observer-Narrator
If there wasn't a character in the original version who was there but was not a participant, only an onlooker, add such a character now. Tell the same story in that character's voice, in first or third person.
Part Four: Involved Author
Tell the same or a new story using the involved author POV.
Part Four may require you to expand the whole thing, up to two or three pages, 1000 words or so. You may find you need to give it a context, find out what led up to it, or follow it further. The detached author takes up as little room as possible, but the involved author needs a fair amount of time and space to move around in. If your original story simply doesn't lend itself to this voice, find a story you want to tell that you can be emotionally and morally involved in. I don't mean by that that it has to be factually true (if it is, you may have trouble getting out of the autobiographical mode in the involved author's voice, which is a fictional mode). And I don't mean that you should use your story to preach. I do mean that the story should be about something that concerns you.
(You can tell which POV is LeGuin's favorite. She also offers further examples of the involved author: Harriet Beecher Stowe, from Uncle Tom's Cabin; Charles Dickens, from Bleak House; J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Lord of the Rings)
NOTE: And then I nearly cut off the tip of my finger and had to go to the emergency room, and now it is hard to type, so I'm going to post this and type up the rest later. It will probably be much later, as I'm going out of the country for three weeks, but there's only four more chapters to go!
The exercises are meant to be used after reading the chapter/discussion, but I'm not going to type up the whole bleeding book, so I'm afraid you'll have to take what you can get. I'll list the examples LeGuin gave, though, so that if you're really industrious you can look them up. She also suggests specific plots/ideas/settings, in case you can't think of something to write your exercise around.
CHAPTER ONE: THE SOUND OF YOUR WRITING
(ex: Gertrude Stein, "Susie Asado"; Rudyard Kipling, "How the Whale Got His Throat"; Mark Twain, from "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County")
Exercise One: Being Gorgeous
Write a paragraph to a page (150-300 words) of narrative that's meant to be read out aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect--any kind of sound effect you like--but NOT rhyme or meter.
Suggestions: climax of a ghost story, an invented fantasy island
-----
CHAPTER TWO: PUNCTUATION
(no examples)
Exercise Two: I Am Garcia Marquez
Write a paragraph to a page (150-350 words) of narrative with no punctuation (and no paragraphs or other breaking devices)
Suggestions: A group of people engaged in a hurried or hectic activity, such as a revolution or the first few minutes of a one-day sale
-----
CHAPTER THREE: SENTENCE LENGTH AND COMPLEX SYNTAX
(ex: Jane Austen, from Mansfeld Park; Harriet Beecher Stowe, from Uncle Tom's Cabin; Mark Twain, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Virginia Woolf, from "Time Passes" in To the Lighthouse)
Note from me: These are all examples of long sentences, or mixed long and short; LeGuin gives no examples of short-sentence writing style and actually seems to have a personal distaste for it. I would give Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as an example of effective short sentences.
Exercise Three: Short and Long
Part One: Write a paragraph, 100-150 words, in sentences of seven or fewer words. No sentence fragments! Each sentence must have a subject and a verb.
Part Two: Write a half-page to a page of narrative, up to 350 words, which is all one sentence.
Suggestions: For Part One, some kind of tense, intense action, like a thief entering a room where someone is sleeping. For Part Two, try a powerful, gathering emotion sweeping in a lot of characters, like a family memory or a key moment at the dinner table or by a hospital bed.
Optional revisits to Exercise Three:
Part One: If you wrote the exercise the first time in an authorial or formal voice, try the same or a different subject in a colloquial, even a dialect voice--perhaps a character talking to another character. If you did it colloquially to start with, back off a little and try a more detached, authorial mode.
Part Two: If your long sentence of syntactically simple, connected mainly with ands or semicolons, try one with some fancy clauses and stuff--show Henry James how. If you already did that, try a more "torrential" mode, using ands, dashes, etc.--let it pour out!
Both Parts: If you told two different stories in the two different sentence lengths, you might try telling the same story in both, and see what happens to the story.
-----
CHAPTER FOUR: REPETITION
(ex: "The Thunder Badger" from Marsden, Northern Paiute Language of Oregon, a word-by-word translation, slightly adapted by U.K.L.)
Exercise Four: Again and Again and Again
Part One: Verbal Repetition
Write a paragraph of narrative (150 words) that includes at least three repetitions of a noun, verb, or adjective (a noticeable word, not an invisible one like "was," "said," "did"). This exercise can easily be done as a group as in-class writing. (If you read it aloud, don't tell people what the repeated word is; do they hear it?)
Part Two: Syntactic Repetition
Write a paragraph to a page of narrative (200-400 words) in which you deliberately repeat the syntactical construction, or the exact rhythm, of a phrase or sentence (or more than one) several times.
(She goes on to give a rather lengthy example that I won't type up here, but I will in a comment if anyone asks.)
Part Three: Structural Repetition
Write a short narrative (350-1000 words) in which something is said or done, and then something is said or done that echoes or repeats it, perhaps in a different context, or by different people, or on a different scale. This can be a complete story, if you like, or a fragment of narrative.
Any two parts of this exercise, or all three, may be combined into one.
-----
CHAPTER FIVE: ADJECTIVE AND ADVERB
(ex: none)
Exercise Five: Chastity
Write a paragraph to a page (200-350 words) of descriptive narrative prose without adjectives or adverbs. No dialogue. The point is to give a vivid description of a scene or action using only verbs, nouns, pronouns, and articles. Adverbs of time (then, next, later, etc.) may be necessary, but be sparing. Be chaste.
If you're using this book in a group, I recommend that you do this exercise at home, because it may take a while. If you're currently working on a longer piece, you might want to try writing the next paragraph or page of it as this exercise.
The first time you do the exercise, write something new. After that you might want to try "chastening" a passage you've already written. It can be interesting.
(Note: LeGuin apparently devised this exercise on her own when she was 14 or 15 years old. This is why she's more amazing than me, because this is easily the hardest writing exercise I've ever done.)
-----
At this point my book is missing chapter six and instead reprinted chapters four and five. Boy, I sure am glad I bought this book for 50 cents off a book cart.
-----
CHAPTER SEVEN: POINT OF VIEW AND VOICE
(ex: LeGuin demonstrates first person, limited third person, and two types of omniscient third, which she labels "omniscient author" and "detached author." I won't type up the examples here, because that would basically involve typing up the whole chapter, but I can go into them in the comments.)
Exercise Seven: POV
Think up a situation for a narrative sketch of 200-350 words. It can be anything you like, but should involve several people doing something. (Several means more than two. More than three will be useful.) It doesn't have to be a big, important event, though it can be; but something should happen, even if only a cart-tangle at the supermarket, a wrangle around the table concerning the family division of labor, or a minor street-accident. . .
Please use little to no dialogue in these POV exercises. While the characters talk, their voices cover the POV, and so you're not exploring that voice, which is the point of the exercise.
Part One: Two Voices
First: Tell your little story from a single POV--that if a participant in the event--an old man, a child, a cat, whatever you like. Use limited third person. Second: Retell the same story from the POV of one of the other people involve in it. Again, use limited third person,
As we go on into the next parts of this exercise, if your little scene or situation or story runs dry, invent another one along the same lines. But if the original one seems to keep turning up new possibilities in different voices, just go on exploring them through it. That will be the most useful, informative way to do the exercise.
Part Two: Detached Narrator
Tell the same story using the detached author or "fly on the wall" POV.
Part Three: Observer-Narrator
If there wasn't a character in the original version who was there but was not a participant, only an onlooker, add such a character now. Tell the same story in that character's voice, in first or third person.
Part Four: Involved Author
Tell the same or a new story using the involved author POV.
Part Four may require you to expand the whole thing, up to two or three pages, 1000 words or so. You may find you need to give it a context, find out what led up to it, or follow it further. The detached author takes up as little room as possible, but the involved author needs a fair amount of time and space to move around in. If your original story simply doesn't lend itself to this voice, find a story you want to tell that you can be emotionally and morally involved in. I don't mean by that that it has to be factually true (if it is, you may have trouble getting out of the autobiographical mode in the involved author's voice, which is a fictional mode). And I don't mean that you should use your story to preach. I do mean that the story should be about something that concerns you.
(You can tell which POV is LeGuin's favorite. She also offers further examples of the involved author: Harriet Beecher Stowe, from Uncle Tom's Cabin; Charles Dickens, from Bleak House; J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Lord of the Rings)
NOTE: And then I nearly cut off the tip of my finger and had to go to the emergency room, and now it is hard to type, so I'm going to post this and type up the rest later. It will probably be much later, as I'm going out of the country for three weeks, but there's only four more chapters to go!
