A Writer’s Exercise
Posted on | April 22, 2010 | 6 Comments
All artists have exercises to help them with the craft of their art. Painters and sculpters are always sketching. Musicians do scales and are always plinking and plunking and tinkling on something. Dancers do their bar work. Singes do vocal warmups.
An exercise we recommend for writers is to sit down, look at something in your immediate environment or out the window and write down what you see. Write it in detail that you would never include in a story. Use as many of your senses as you can. It is a very good way to flex your observation muscles and your facility with words, with evoking an experience. And you never know, you may end up using a lot of them in some form in your writing.
When I was taking care of my mother in her cabin in Northern Idaho, everything was new and different for me. I didn’t have much to do most of the day, so I started describing the things in her living room, the hummingbirds drinking out of the red, red feeder right outside the window, the way the shadows of the clouds rolled over the green fields of the valley beyond. I described the yellow flowers on the hill behind the cabin. I described a wonderful thunder and lightning storm that I watched travel toward us from a long way off one bright night.
These exercises, done over weeks, became an integral part of one of the plots of my novel Guardian Mosaic.
When I got back home, I was still in the habit of observing and writing what I saw in my immediate surroundings. I described my own tiny living room with new eyes, having not seen it for several months. This became part of what I consider to be the best thing I’ve ever written, a surreal prose poem about my mother’s death called A Journey Home.
Even if you never use the actual descriptions, it’s a wonderful, rich thing to do. And you’ll never know if there’s something there to eventually use if you don’t try!
~Geoff Hoff
Co-author of the how-to guide On Writing a Short Story.
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6 Responses to “A Writer’s Exercise”
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April 22nd, 2010 @ 3:09 pm
Geoff,
Beautiful piece here and wise advice to keep the writing and observing muscles limber. Thank you for sharing your insights.
Bobbye Middendorf
The Write Synergies Guru
April 22nd, 2010 @ 3:14 pm
Hi Geoff,
As always you delight and inspire. I love the idea of this exercise, particularly that it will help in flexing our observation muscles. There are a lot of times that I’m not very observant and I should be always.
Thanks for the insight and motivation!
Deb
.-= Deb Augur´s last blog ..Opt in Forms and Autoresponders and Shopping Carts… Oh My! =-.
April 22nd, 2010 @ 3:27 pm
Thank you Bobbye! I see so many simple things that writers (and artists in general) can do to ease up on what may have become the burden of creativity for them. It should be easy and fun. And when it’s not easy or fun, it should at the very least be fulfilling.
April 22nd, 2010 @ 4:00 pm
Deb – I’m delighted and inspired that I was able to delight and inspire you! Thank you.
Yes, the simple exercises are often the most powerful. If you do do it, let me know how it is for you.
April 22nd, 2010 @ 6:16 pm
I’ve never done anything like that. hmmm. Actually I’ve never had much formal writing coaching or instruction, so your blog has lots of cool ideas in that regard.
thanks for the post
April 22nd, 2010 @ 8:57 pm
Rob – oh, I have lots to give you!
As with anything, there are ways to do it more effectively. If I can impart some of those ways, I’ve done a good job. Thanks for your comment!