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Jenny Boully - The Book of Beginnings and Endings
Creative Writing Exercises
1.) We often begin writing with words and words alone, not envisioning first a form in which our words can fill. Take a traditional form that is already in existence—you don’t have to “invent” a form. For example, you can use the form of a store receipt, a journal entry, a travelogue, a recipe, a quiz, a menu, a short story, a play, a tax document, a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a website, a legal document, a poem, a novel, a textbook—if it has print on or in it, chances are it will work for this exercise. Think of a way to disrupt this form. Can you rearrange the elements or make this form somehow fragmentary? Now, write in it. How do you find your traditional writerly impulses changing or adapting to the form?
2.) Write an essay about yourself in third-person. Think not in terms of the “essay” but in terms of “fiction.” The trick is to imagine yourself as a fictional character or a character within a fictional work. You aren’t being asked to invent a situation, but rather to write about your experience as if you were writing fiction. You can choose any experience to write about, but you must switch “authors” throughout your essay. For example, imagine that your author is heartless. Then, imagine that your author is loving. Suddenly, your author is simply indifferent. In another scene, your author is now an author of your choice (i.e. imagine Kafka writing about you). Use all the literary elements that you would were you writing fiction. Don’t worry about tonal shifts or abrupt transitions—most likely, they will work to better your essay. During or after or even before writing, you may want to think about the form your essay will take. Will you use section breaks, numbered sections, another organizing device, one long paragraph, or several paragraphs?
3.) Dream-life, the day-dreaming-life, and the imagined-life can sometimes be experienced so profoundly that they feel real to us. Some of our thoughts, when they approach a frequency that can be called “obsessive” may be the perfect “experience” to write about for this exercise. The challenge of this assignment is to accept these experiences as something real and to write about them as if they were real. You can write a dream journal, but try not to ever mention that what you’re writing are dreams! You can move in and out of dreams in your essay. You can write a scene or outcome that you keep imagining in your head. For example, do you often think about getting something you really want or, conversely, getting something you don’t want? You may want your obsessive joyful thoughts to mingle with your obsessive painful thoughts. Whatever you ultimately choose to write about and however you want to write about these “experiences,” never point out in your essay that these are experiences lived outside of the physical world. The challenge here is to let this essay live in that physical world without your challenging its validity or right to exist as real.
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