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Lia Purpura - On Looking: Essays
Creative Writing Exercises
Experiment
Visit a natural object in its habitat/locale at least once a week for a month. This might be a pinecone under a bench, a vine in a backyard, a dead and decomposing rat. Describe it each time in great sensual detail. If you can go twice a week, all the better. Do not look back at previous descriptions. At the end of the month, set the descriptions out in front of you and work as a collagist and come up with as many ways as you can to arrange your descriptions. Arranging chronologically will likely be the most obvious shape at first. Fine. But even within that progressive trajectory, note the movements, changes, shifts in both the object and in your perception. Then try some other modes of arrangement: in what other ways might these descriptions "go together?" Any collagist cuts, rips, tears, rearranges, blacks out some parts, highlights other parts, juxtaposes, aligns. What "shows" when you emphasize element X over Y? PLAY in other words. Let yourself wander around in possibilities. Experiment, try out, approach. This will not guarantee a poem or essay but unhinged from the usual "utility" of an exercise you ought to feel, at least, a little freer, untethered from the requirement to "produce."
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