From our first session of the new Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop: a writing prompt

 

I discovered this interview guided by Padraig O Tuama with Henri Cole while listening to Poetry Unbound podcast driving to the American River last weekend. If you haven't listened yet to this podcast, give it a try asap. 

Three hours of driving disappeared while I listened in awe.

Henri Cole describing the context for this next poem: 

"So this poem is from, it’s set in Japan, in a town just north in the outskirts of Kyoto, where I lived when I was 45. I was born in Japan and this was the first time back. And in this apartment I lived in two tatami mat rooms, and it had a tiny backyard, but the backyard was just full of praying mantises, of all things. So that was really the context. My father had died and my mother was quite sick."

Pillowcase With Praying Mantis

I found a praying mantis on my pillow.
‘What are you praying for?’ I asked. ‘Can you pray
for my father’s soul, grasping after Mother?’
Swaying back and forth, mimicking the color
of my sheets, raising her head like a dragon’s,
she seemed to view me with deep feeling, as if I were
St. Sebastian bound to a Corinthian column
instead of just Henri lying around reading.
I envied her crisp linearity, as she galloped
slow motion onto my chest, but then she started
mimicking me, lifting her arms in an attitude
of a scholar thinking or romantic suffering.
‘Stop!’ I sighed, and she did, flying in a wide arc,
like a tiny god-horse hunting for her throne room.

Writing Prompt: In this prompt we can mimic one or two techniques from Cole in this last poem. 

One, he has chosen a small moment of an animal encounter to focus on and describe. He has chosen to write the encounter as a conversation. 

Two, he projects his own problems into the life of the mantis, asking it to pray for his parents. The mantis allows him to share this problem and his own situation indirectly while the encounter and the conversation are the direct subject of his writing. 

Choose an animal encounter of your own. Write about it, as a conversation if you’d like. Try to project somehow your own human situation into this encounter. Write without an agenda and without stopping or correcting for 20 minutes. This writing may become a poem, or a story, or part of a bigger writing project.

Happy writing!

 

Where does a story begin? A Writing Prompt to try on a summer afternoon

 What draws you into a story?  Think of the stories you’ve liked.  Why do you read?  What do you get out of it?

“In stories…I suppose there is always a moment… when the image, the set of relationships that seem actually to reveal something about life, forms”

- Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures

“ A story is a moment after which nothing will ever be the same again – John L’Heureux

What starts a story?

·     Tobias Wolf says story begins when he sees something that bothers him, for example two people fighting on the sidewalk, and he wants to figure it them out – character driven story. What is the seed of what will happen?  This story is plot- driven.

·     Aristotle: a beginning, a middle, an end. 

    Narrative arc: conflict, crisis, resolution, or opening, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution – the triangle.

How can we use personal experience in our writing?  How can you include compassion?  Self-vulnerability of the writer? 

Our prompt:

1.      Write a ten line story - Narrate a single incident/event between two people. It could be you or a relative or a friend.  Think of an incident of some kind of conflict, an irrevocable moment between two people, and include description of where and when. 

2.      Now go back and circle where the energy is/images that are rich and freewrite on those sections – let yourself free associate.

what images/metaphors do you see happening?

what questions make you question more?

3.          3. Write more detail, a line below each line, until there are 20 lines weaving back and forth between setting, event, character, and image - adding more detail with each line.                      

 4.      Finally, rewrite in a different order! You can number the lines and randomly order or write it            backwards or start in the middle.   

        Don’t be chronological. Be generous to your reader! Talk with them as if they are a close friend.