Creative Writing Exercises
Lyric Essay Exercise
To free yourself up (as an experiment) from having to entirely “make sense” discursively in nonfiction prose, let’s try this:
On this piece of paper, quickly write down a phrase – anything that comes to mind.
Pass your page to the person on your right. Next person – quickly write down a phrase that comes to mind as you read the first person’s phrase.
Repeat two more times. Then pass the page a final time. Person #5 – you’ve got a piece of paper with four phrases on it. Write a one-page lyric essay that incorporates all the phrases in any way you want. Try to build an unconventional kind of meaning and structure: one that works by leaping from idea to idea, image to image, using the glue of association and juxtaposition, the power of the first-person lyric voice, sound and other poetic qualities, parallelism, surprise, etc.. Use any structure you want. Be daring. Be vivid.
Meditative Essay Exercise
Write a brief meditation inspired by one of the following quotations. Try to emulate one or more of the literary models we’ve studied. But more importantly, use your imagination to explore what you feel in reaction to one of the quotations.
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Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. –Susan Sontag
What at one time one refuses to see never vanishes but returns, again and again, in many forms. –Susan Griffin
The sun! The sun! And all we can become!
And the time ripe for running to the moon! –Theodore Roethke
If there had been anything more than silence, would I have felt the need to speak in the first place? –Paul Auster
Our present will become the past of other men and women. We depend on them to remember it with the complexity with which it was suffered. As others, once, depended on us. –Eavan Boland
To be lost, it is not necessary to inhabit a wilderness, or even to cry. –Alastair Reid
Make an attempt as a gatherer of history and as a writer of family tales. Create a list of questions for various family members and record their answers and your response to those answers.
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