Activities

Some General Suggestions

In this semester the focus is on playful uses of language and how this works in creative writing. Unlike last semester, when we looked at what was involved in writing poetry, this workshop series is more open in terms of genre. However, as my preferred genre is poetry, there will be a slant towards that kind of writing.

Some tips for aspiring writers in no particular order:

• Get yourself a nice pen that is a joy to write with; writing is a sensuous experience.
• Don’t type your work straight into the computer. It makes texts look like print and too ready for that most important element in writing, for
• editing… no text is ever finished, you can and should always think about how you can improve it. First drafts are just that and in the words of Robert Lowell usually ‘shitty’.
• Get yourself an elegant notebook (of the paper kind!). This can be any size, small enough to fit into a jacket pocket up to A4. Use it for writing down ideas as well as drafts.
• Spend about 10 minutes every day writing. More if you can. Go through your notes and see which ones can be developed further. This is time you can happily ‘waste’, because it won’t be wasted.
• Get yourself a box, the Bits Box, for small pieces of paper, on which you write phrases you like or expressions that somehow resonate. Pull them out when you do your ten minutes of writing and nothing else comes to min

Session 13: Post-it / Feedback Session

Session 11: Another mixed bag

We started as always with

Automatic Writing

to reflect the theme of the day. As this was a very mixed set of activities all aimed at getting to write, the cue was “The way to overcome the fear of a blank page is …”

Activity 1: Losing my ...

We began by brainstorming a number of abstract concepts one might lose at some stage in our lives, basically experiencing a kind of awakening, rude or otherwise. We then picked one that spoke to us and, using a mind map with the key term at its centre, tried to find as many ideas (branches) as possible to list how this has affected or might affect us. In a next step we highlighted the ones that we found were unexpected or unusual/different from what everybody else in the same situation would have experienced. The final step then was to write a free verse poem using the elements we had selected.  

Activity 2: Famous poem titles

We used a list with titles of famous poems, which we might have come across at some stage, as a spring board for writing. To help us along we had the Adagio from Bruckner’s 7^th symphony play in the background.

Activity 3: Writing back

The idea of this exercise was to focus on something in literature – or popular culture – that had always held a certain degree of puzzlement, for instance in my case, why Godot never turns up. We first listed literary works that had us puzzled, then chose one that we found particularly poignant. With this choice we then listed the ideas or notions we wanted the character or the author of the piece to address and then wrote a text in response. This could also be a reworked pastiche of the piece that somehow resolved the issue in question.

Activity 4: A starting point or a way to end…

Once again we started with a document that we could fill in to create random combination of ideas. We then tried out random sequences of 4 numbers to see what sort of really abstract notions this could create. These notions then were either the title, the opening phrase of the first sentence or a concluding phrase (the “moral”) of a short poem or prose vignette.

Activity 5: Funnily, because I am...

This activity was meant to follow the idea of automatic writing in the sense that it would yield a starting cue for an exploration. On the other hand the ide could also be used as the centre of a mind map. This time we used the chat to list adjectives or nouns to describe someone who has a specific role, both of which would reflect (a) character feature(s). Starting ideas were the adjective angry or the noun perfectionist. With this we completed the writing cue “I’m so adjective, I will always” or “I’m such a noun, I will always”. The aim was to make the behaviour(s) as absurd as possible.

Activity 6: You make the connection!

Once again, we brainstormed lists, this time with one column dedicated to practical experiences, the other to abstract concepts or notions. The former had to be as specific as possible. However, in difference to other activities where the combinations depended on chance, here we reviewed the two lists with a view that as an individual writer we could deliberately select two elements, ideally one each from the two columns, but it was also acceptable to combine elements from the same columns. The point of the activity was to explain what the connection was between the two aspects. Ideally this should have had a slightly off-the-wall vibe to it, perhaps even a touch of a conspiracy theory or an explanatory urban legend.

Session 10: What you would not expect

Today’s session played on the notions of what you might not expect someone to do or say. To get the ball rolling in

Automatic Writing

we began with the cue “People would have expected me to …”

Activity 1: In and out of character

We began with a brainstorming on “characterological stereotypes” (and edited PDF) i.e. certain types of people from whom we expect a certain type of behaviour. We then picked one and listed typical features and behaviours and possibly why we felt that these were expected. In a next step we imagined that this person would behave totally out of character. This could then either be turned into a narrative (poem) or it could be expressed as the person talking, either about something that really was talking place, as a wistful musing as to what the person would love to do (if only…) or from some outside observer commenting. (A good example as a starting point is Roger McGough’s “Pay-back Time”. and PDF)

Activity 2: Dastardly Rationalisations

The starting point for this activity was Patricia Smith’s poem “Skinhead” which can be seen performed here. The idea behind this poem is to take a person, who is really quite unpalatable or despicable and to let that person rationalise about themselves. We again tried to brainstorm an number of characters that would fit the bill, this time using the zoom chat to contribute ideas. For the writing we picked one, made a list of the things this person would or might (want to) do and gave an explanation from their point of view why that was totally OK. The outcome could either be satirical or “scary” as I think Smith’s poem is.

Activity 3: The secret life of …

Superheroes and certain agents need a cover identity, which should as far as possible detract from their actual status or character. This cover identity is often the opposite of their real purpose in a setting (for example Clark Kent and Superman). But we also have the Walter Mitty motif, where a really boring character has a diametrically opposed, imaginary heroic persona. Once again we started with a shared brainstorming on characters that combined two of the three aspects (here's  the edited PDF. This was meant to provide some inputs on the basis of which it would be possible to use a character as a speaker in the text that we would compose. Another possibility would be to present the character in question from the point of view of someone looking on, perhaps in exasperation or in amusement at the ineptitude of the “hero”.  

Assignments for the week: Some suggestions for texts to come out of these exercises have already been made in the descriptions of the various activities. In any case, whatever the genre (and a slam poem would work in all of these cases, clearly with a very distinctive speaker’s voice.  

Session 9: Not very nice now, is it…!

The

Automatic Writing

cue, as always intended to nudge our imagination in the direction of today’s session, was “Who on earth would ever write a poem about…”

Activity 1: (Not) celebrating the season

We started by going into breakout rooms in pairs where we brainstormed concepts and experiences we associate with a specific season, in our case with spring, in simple keywords. These were listed by the partners with the instruction to make the list as complete, i.e. as long as possible. In a second step the groups were asked to assign the items on their list to one of three categories “positive”, “indifferent” and “negative”. The next step, individually or in pairs, to make a selection of the concepts with a view eventually to composing an “anti-gushing” (list) poem about spring; this could include the positive elements but with perhaps a bit of a grumpy spin. Finally we tried to formulate complete statements out of the ordered keywords we had put together in the composition step.

Activity 2: Damning by faint praise

For this activity we first thought of a person we once knew or still know, who we are not overly fond of. Again, the idea was to think of as many aspects, habits, features, ways of expressing themselves, etc. of that person, this time on a mind map. Like in the previous activity these could absolutely include positive elements, and again, the longer the list, the more interesting. We then made selection of the most memorable and probably annoying items on the mind map and wrote each item we selected in a complete sentence on separate strips of paper. We tried out different sentence “ideas”, e.g. “I love the way, you / s/he…” or a fictitious observer seeing the actions (S/he loves the way you / s/he …); “[the person] does X” (implied: like nobody else); “you / s/he would be perfect if only …” These were then arranged in what can only be described as “the most effective order” to end up with a text in which the person in question is “damned with faint praise”. This could also be done, using the rhetorical figure of paralepsis, for instance, “let me not mention X” (and by doing so actually not only mentioning, but actually drawing attention to X).

Note: Go for humour, e.g. irony or sarcasm, rather than anger or bitterness. Experiment with the pronoun perspective: either talk about the “3^rd person”, address them as “you” or see what happens if you let the person speak as “I”.

Activity 3: A perfect life story

The idea for this activity comes from the poem “Who’s Who” by W.H. Auden. Again, individually we started out by focusing on a character. This could be someone we know about, a character from a fictional text or the like. The idea, like in Auden’s poem, was to focus on the well-known as well as on the mundane, but also to keep the subject’s name and too many clues to her/his/their identity out of the final text, a narrative poem. An additional idea was to see if perhaps a word could be fitted into most lines / every line as a kind of “backbone”, perhaps something like a speech marker (“like”, “you know”) or a conversational cliché (perfectly + adjective, “actually”, etc.).  

Assignments for the week: Suggestions for texts to come out of these exercises have already been made in the descriptions of the various activities

Session 8: Institutions and Conventions

As always we started with

Automatic Writing

and the cue “What totally weirded me out at that freak show…” in order to set the tone for today’s session, which was to have an imaginative (and quirky) look at institutions or concepts and make them deviate from what one would normally associate with them.

Activity 1: Institutions that should perhaps exist

Based on the automatic writing activity we thought about a number of relatively everyday institutions, but populated them with people or entities that one would not readily associate with them in reality. These newly created institutions are listed in this google document and, a little less unstructured, in this PDF. These concepts of institutions were taken as starting points, perhaps for a list poem of the items in these places, an advertising leaflet for the attraction of the institution, or for an account of a visit; alternatively a possibility was to adopt a position of one of the items to be found in that context and report what they perceive from their perspective, either being aware of what their situation would seem to imply or to be completely unawares.

Activity 2: Clearing up some confusing notions

Depending on how we pronounce/stress certain words or phrases they take on a different meaning. A similar outcome is changing words in an idiom or taking it literally. This was the focus of the second brainstorming of today’s session. We compiled such notions that could have more than one meaning, focusing in the one that is not the generally accepted one, in this google document or PDF. An example to how this can work is Roger McGough’s poem about the Cats Protection League with a very specific meaning of protection.
The lists were meant to be a starting point to get our imagination going, with all kinds of possibilities for texts that could come from this, a silly poem or narrative to illustrate our “alternative” interpretation of the meaning, a narrative text with the notion as a punchline, a dictionary entry with the notions as headwords, etc.

Activity 3: Conversations, translations and intensions

We looked at things we often say and rarely mean, compiled in this google document and in this PDF. This, once again was raw material for a variety of possible texts. One would be to write a dialogue – as a dramatic sketch, a poem or, perhaps a bit less recommended, a narrative – which features what the interlocutors say vs. what they actually think and intend. This might need a little imagination as to how the text could present the two (or three) levels. Another possibility would be to absurdly mix the columns so that clichéd conversational utterance, speaker meaning and intension would be random and perhaps acquire new meanings. This could be particularly interesting if the still largely empty column of the context would be filled in too. Another possibility would be someone who is older and more cynical disabusing someone younger and pretty naïve about getting the real meaning of what a third person is saying the second one, for instance in terms of relationship advice.

Assignments for the week: Suggestions for texts to come out of these exercises have already been made in the descriptions of the various activities.

Session 7: "Post-it" / Feedback Session

How to do this

Two things

• (the one I always mention, even though it is not really much of a concern) Remember, you are anonymous, but that also means, don't be mean or disrespectful.
  
• (the one that is really quite important - and I also always mention it)  Remember that at this stage all texts are  still very much in flux and can benefit from honest feedback, mentioning things that the reader doesn't quite get or feels they don't quite fit. So go beyond "OMG, this is like so totallyawesome!!!!".
  

A remark on dealing with the feedback

Sessions 6: A Mixed Bag

Today’s session was meant to give a range of activities that had no actual thematic link, as the sessions normally do. It was meant to be a way of exploring various ideas in preparation for our next workshop meeting, the “post-it” session.

The

Automatic writing

cue for this week was “There is no easy way to say this”.

Activities

For most of the activities this week, we contributed ideas or suggestions as well as some rules in a Google document, which is also, slightly edited, available as a PDF.

Activity 1: How kids see the world

The aim was to explore the world to children, how children think things work, and what perhaps they deduct from what adults tell them. We collected some of those ideas and concepts. The aim was to write a text, perhaps a poem, working with some concepts or ideas that spoke to us, either from the perspective of a child (possibly questioning them or imagining what might happen if the rules were disregarded), or from the perspective of an adult that tries to explain, perhaps trying to put the child right.

Activity 2: Rules for a poem

The idea for this activity and the first two the “fixed rules” come from a workshop with Roger McGough. The object was to write a poem with 10 lines using 9 rules with two being fixed, i.e. the repetition of the first as the last line and the rhyme of the penultimate with the final line, as these are a very neat way of setting up the ending of the poem. The rest of the rules were suggested by the participants; these could be chosen on the basis of which ones a writer liked. (BTW it is surprising how helpful constraints in a poem can be in its composition.)

Activity 3: Worst case scenario

This activity was inspired by a folky song called “The Sick Note” (sorry for blowing my own trumpet here), in which an everyday activity goes drastically wrong. Again, on the  Google document we contributed ideas for such every day activities; these were meant to act as a starting point, from which we brainstormed about what could possibly go wrong. The ensuing sequence of events were then to be written up as a story.

Activity 4: Procrastinating

For this activity be compiled two lists one with things that we prefer to put off, and one with activities to embark on in order to “put off the evil moment” when we really would have to tackle the unpleasant task. The text to aim for was either a list poem of ever more absurd things to do to procrastinate (with some kind of a “moral” to end with, perhaps), or a short story about what happened at the time or as result of our procrastination.

Activity 5: Who was it

This activity was inspired by Philip Larkin’s poem Mr Bleaney (which you can hear, read by Philip Larkin himself). We imagined walking into an abandoned bedsit/room or an unoccupied furnished flat and listed what we might find there. With the most poignant items we tried to piece together the life of the person who lived in this space, writing it up as a poem or a short prose text.  

Activity 6: Playing around with words

This was a playful exercise, inspired by Wendy Cope’s “The Uncertainty of the Poet” or “Opening the Cage” by Edwin Morgan. The idea is to take a sentence and to rearrange its words in as many different iterations, perhaps also using punctuation to help create “meaning.  The Google document lists quite a few interesting ideas to play around with.

Assignments for the week: Prepare texts to be presented at next sessions.

Session 5: The Whole Hidden Truth

The theme of today was (absurd) explanations – or conspiracy theories satirised. The

Automatic Writing

cue was “Call me crazy but it is clear that…”

Activity 1: What has Always Puzzled Me

In everybody’s lift there are things we find, to put it politely, puzzling. We first created a list of such things with a google document which is also available as an alphabetised  PDF. We then picked one and tried to write a zany explanation about how the puzzle could be explained or what the loopy origin for this phenomenon was and how it creates the situation we now (no longer?) find puzzling.

Activity 2: Today the Kitchen, Tomorrow the World

We created a display wall with padlet to list more or less inanimate entities. The point was that in everyday life they don’t have agency or indeed a voice. We chose one of the suggestions, the one(s) we liked best, and then imagined that this entity felt down-trodden and rebellious, wanting to become more dominant and finally to take over the world. No holds were to be barred in the rant of this entity…(Many thanks to former medievalist colleague Lucy, whose rant by a daisy today to take over the lawn, tomorrow the world was the inspiration for this activity.)

Activity 3: Why Can’t I […] Melt Your Cold Cold Heart

This activity was inspired by another Roger McGough poem You and I, and by the Hank Williams song “Cold Cold Heart”, about troubled relationships (bluegrassy/jazzy and pretty jazzy (Norah Jones). It basically addresses how the same action can be interpreted in very different ways by two people. We started out by brainstorming actions in a relationship, listed in a table with two columns, that are quite run-of-the-mill. Then, in the second column we added how the same action could be seen as an attempt to hurt or insult. The text to be generated from this would be a list contrasting what one speaker does and how the other speaker interprets this.

Assignments for the week: Complete any of the above into a fully formed text. Most of them would work as poems or as monologues. For Activity 3, either try a list poem, a dialog or two separate but linked monologues, which could be in poetry form, ideally using the same sequence of contentious aspects and the same  sentence structure.   

Session 4: What if, or what... Linguistic Mayhem

The cue for

Automatic Writing

to set the mood was “I sometimes wonder what would have happened if…” as the topic of today is largely related to imagining what could be or could have been.

Activity 1: Whacky Conditions

We continued to pay around with hypothetical possibilities. We started by filling in a table with numbered fields, a left hand-column with random if-clauses, the right-hand column with equally random main clauses. The resulting document therefore had two columns with numbers for each field. We then made random number pairs, which would generate random sentences. If one of them triggered something to write about, we took this as the opening line and then, a little like the automatic writing exercise, we carried on. To end the text we either used the same sentence as the opening one or either of the two clauses with another one we composed ourselves.

Activity 2: Spinning a Yarn of Consequences

The beginning of this activity was to start with a blank sheet of note paper to be filled with keywords as follows: we began by envisaging an everyday situation, something that was completely within things done or dealt with every day. Then we imagined something unexpected to happen. This would then trigger another development, etc.  All of these situations/developments and their consequences would be written down as keywords. Finally we rounded the chain of events off either with a catastrophic outcome or a waking up from a reverie and deciding to act differently in order to avoid all these consequences.

From a point of view of composition: this could be a monologue, a dialogue with one person asking the other questions or co-constructing the story or a simple short story. If it is the latter, experimenting with narrator perspective would be interesting, with a choice of using I, you or third person as a speaker.

Activity 3: What I Love/Hate About

This activity is also based on connected clauses. The basic format of the resulting text is “What I love about X is that Y. What I hate about Y is that Z. What I love about Z is that …” and to use this for the rest of the text, most likely a list poem. In order to get the ball rolling we started doing this in pairs (breakout rooms) and shared documents. A second stage would be then to try something similar on our own. (Many thanks for this activity to Roger McGough and his poem “In Two Minds”)

Assignments for the week: With any of the above activities, play around with genre, with editing and with various perspectives (this would certainly for Activities 2 and 3)

Session 3: Travelogues

Automatic Writing

to set the theme (or at least one of them) for today. The opening cue is a nod to a novelty song of the Seventies: “Didn’t we have a lovely time that time we went to…”.

Activity 1: What I Saw on My Travels

We brainstormed places we had travelled to. For each one we tried to think of one or two moments that somehow seemed memorable¨; we wrote these down in the form of keywords, Where possible we tried to link them with a sense memory. We then made a list of the places we were focusing on and reformulated the keywords into one, perhaps two sentences, in which we made sure that every words mattered and those that didn’t were cut. The last step was to make a list poem out of these short texts, first by breaking the lines in interesting / intriguing places and then by ordering the individual impressions in an order that was to be effective.

Activity 2: Daytrip to ...

This activity began by us trying to find intriguing place names on Google Maps starting from “York UK”, “Durham UK”, “Carlisle UK”, “Glasgow UK” “Roscommon Ireland” etc. These were placed in a Google document which is available as a PDF here. We then picked one f the places that we liked the name of and imagined five (loopy) local attractions. Out of this there were two possible texts to be written, firstly a tourist brochure explaining and praising the five local attractions or, secondly, a travel writing piece about a daytrip to the place in question.  

Activity 3: What we would need a word for…

We started this activity by brainstorming individually experiences, things we find intriguing, annoying, unsettling, amusing, etc. writing down a few ideas of this kind in either keywords or simple sentences. The next step was to go through the list and see if any of the place names could work as a headword in a dictionary which would be the term for our peeve or observation. The next and very vital step was to write up the experience and then ruthlessly and rigorously editing it down to as few words as possible. (Acknowledgement: this activity was derived from The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff  by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd)

Assignments for the week: Complete any or all of the incipient texts from the class.

Session 2: More Starter Ideas

As always, we started with

Automatic Writing

using the cue “Trust me, I’m a poet...”.

Activity 1: Co-operating on a Free Association Poem

With each participant (using the RTF-form for this poem) having a copy of a shared document, we formed pairs in which we filled in the central column, alternating between the two partners of the pair, resulting in a string of words that we associated with the previous one. We then, again alternating, wrote a line of a poem “around” the word which we had not supplied in the central column. This was meant to create a free-verse poem built around a string of associations. At the end we added a title in the empty space at the top.

Activity 2: Chinwag at a Fag End

This activity was to imitate an “improv” situation in which two characters talk to each other starting from a random premise. We started by compiling a list of sayings or quotations on compiled in this PDF. Each participant then chose at least one of them, not necessarily their own. We were then paired, again randomly, and the idea was to create a dialog which was taking at the end of an “event”, e.g. a party, a class, a relationship, moving out of a place, an evening at the pub, etc. Each pair created a shared document, with one participant starting the “conversation”, which could start off with one of the phrases chosen. The conversation was then further improvised with the other participant with both particpants trying to find places where their chosen phrase(s) could be fitted in. The entire conversation was meant to be between 10 and 20 turns long.   

Activity 3: Between Starting and Finishing Line

A problem we sometimes struggle with is where to begin and where to end a poem or, in fact, a text of any kind. This activity was meant to counteract this difficulty. From a list of opening and closing lines of poems, we chose a couple of lines that spoke to us (at a pinch, using an opening line from one and a closing line from another poem would be an option too). The idea was to use the opening and closing line without writing it down on the paper used for the first draft; the only thing that would be written down was the part that connected the two. After a few days, we would then try and come up in the editing stage with our own first and last line.

Assignments for the week: Edit and complete the partner exercises or write either (or both) of them using the same strategy, but doing it on our own. Activity 3 would probably yield a text that would be all “our own”.

Session 1: Making a Start

As always at the beginning of a semester, we looked at some basic ideas about writing and rules about keeping up with the work in this workshop.

And as every one of these workshops we started with

Automatic Writing

an activity that is meant to get us writing without the pressure of having to create something important or lasting, simply by writing down anything that springs to mind starting from a cue, which today was “What I really need to tackle in the coming …”.

Activity 1: About this Person I Just Met

We began by noting down three things about ourselves, one of which could (but didn’t have to) be fictional. We then randomly got put into groups of three, which was done in breakout rooms. There we presented the three features. Next we asked three questions about each participant, the answers to which could be truthful or made up, especially if we didn’t want to answer a question. We then picked one person to write about and put together a first draft of either

• an acrostic using the person’s name as the starting point of each line, or
• a short prose vignette in which we described our thoughts after meeting this person at a fictional party or in a fictional meeting

Activity 2: Starting from this Concept

This an activity to make a start on the Bits Box. It was inspired by the title of a novel by Swiss author Hermann Burger called Die künstliche Mutter, which could be translated as “the artificial mother” or “the bionic mother”, in either case creating a rather intriguing image and obviously a story that arose from this image.

We first compiled two lists, one with adjectives and another with nouns on the shared Google document. There is also a PDF copy available. We then made some random combinations of two numbers between 1 and 50, for instance 13/42, which yields a combination of an adjective and a noun, and then decided on which determiner (article) to go with this. The result could be a title of a text or possibly the central idea of a text.

Activity 3: Writing a Haiku

Haikus are a Japanese miniature poem form consisting of three lines, the first with 5, the second with 7 and the last with another 5 syllables. They traditionally contain a reference to time and one to either a bug, a plant or a child.

We created two columns in a shared document, a list of times and bugs/plants/kids with the left containing the times and the right being. The idea was to pick one element from each column and to write a haiku with those two terms.

Here is an example of my rewriting of a classic Basho haiku

            Spring comes, the snow melts
            The lanes are flooded with water
             And delighted children.

Assignment for the week: Rework any of the above activities into a text, either a poem of a prose vignette. (And remember, poems don’t have to rhyme…)