Good Monday All!
Hello and welcome to the first Inkwell Recap in a .. month or so. That's partially my fault, with being completely and utterly creatively exhausted with my attempts at the first attempt at Camp NaNo eating up all that my muse could offer, and it wasn't enough. That is to say, my first months' attempt failed completely and utterly. That however is neither here nor there. This is about what went down at Inkwell tonight.
Zack, one of our younger members, and easily one of the more talented, offered his views on the writing process and his helpful tips, along with the writing exercise I'll provide you with at the bottom of this entry. His advice was insightful and above all gave all the writers permission to suck. Look, this isn't new advice, but to someone, somewhere it's actually fairly radical. The ability to let yourself suck in order to get your first draft out is something that not a lot of writers allow, or even let themselves do. Below is the video to the Vlog Brothers entry by Maureen Johnson, a well known author in the YA Genre.
In addition to this bit of insight, he offered a writing challenge that has been deemed one of the hardest to do given the subject matter and the delicacy with which it has to be handled. With that being said, I leave you with the classic T.S. Eliot/John Gardner writing prompt.
This exercise is quite possibly the most difficult, demanding and important exercise a writer can ever do. The poet and critic, T. S. Eliot, coined the phrase “objective correlative” to designate what he believed was the most important element in writing: Rendering the description of an object so that the emotional state of the character from whose point of view we receive the description is revealed WITHOUT ever telling the reader what that emotional state is or what has motivated it.
The late John Gardner, recognized in his lifetime as the leading creative writing teacher in the United States, developed the following exercise for students:
A middle-age man is waiting at a bus stop. He has just learned that his son has died violently. Describe the setting from the man’s point of view WITHOUT telling your reader what has happened. How will the street look to this man? What are the sounds? Odors? Colors? That this man will notice? What will his clothes feel like? Write a 250 word description
Respond with your flash fiction in the comments section if you feel so compelled. This was my response.
I sat, cell phone dropping from my hands in perceived slow motion. I had no strength. Nothing left within me to propel me forward; to get me to care about what was going on. The air was silent and the music that played a continuous theme to my life seemed to come crashing to a halt, jumbled up behind the last sentence I had heard. A screech filled the deadened air and I looked up, seeing a bus pull towards the curb. I glanced to my side at the man sitting with me on the bench. He was saying something. What I couldn’t tell, but from the lip movement, he seemed to be asking if I was ok. I shook my head; in a sort of gesture I could hear him. His ragged gloves hand, gripped my shoulder and I looked to where the cell phone had fallen. I went to go pick it up and someone handed it to me, their cool blue eyes meeting my own. All at once, the noises of the day to day world came rushing back. The cars, the voices of the people around me, and my wife’s voice on the other end of the cell phone, seeing if I was still there. It had started off like any other day, and now the world seemed to have settled into cooler shades of black and grey. The concrete seemed darker, and the bus that pulled up in front of the stop wasn’t its normal vibrant blue. The sour smells of the city, seemed more pungent. The sky had clouded over, shadowing all that surrounded, as if to echo my mood. The whoosh of the doors to the bus opened with a gust of air, blowing what was left of my hair backwards.
“All aboard, last stop approaching” The shock of the moment seemed to wear off and in that moment I simply cried. Collapsed onto the bench and cried. This street would be forever changed.
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