WISE WORDS FROM RAY BRADBURY, AND A WRITING EXERCISE

The current edition of PARIS REVIEW magazine, has an interview with RAY BRADBURY which is well worth searching out and reading.

This bit struck me most though, not least because it is what I am always telling my students:

You can't write for other people. You can't write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things.

And of course, if you are authentic your beliefs may come across. But they will not be forced. And they will matter.

So how do we do this?

In the interview Ray Bradbury suggests this great exercise - again students of mine may recognise it, but it's good to see that RB himself uses it. I've adapted it for here:

TEN THINGS:

Make a list of then things you hate. Write a poem or story really ranting about them.

Now make a list of then things you love. Celebrate them in your writing. Go over the top. A love poem to your electric lightswitch.

And lastly combine up to five things from each. Combine them in such a way the reader doesn't realise this is an exercise. Can you swop them? Form a passion for something on your hate list, or mock a precious thought or object.

Whatever happens, you will have created a piece with energy and life. Plus it's fun. Which is never a bad thing.

I DON"T KNOW...

Here's a writing exercise for you to play with.

We are conditioned to talk a lot nowadays about what we know, but what don’t you know? What questions have you stopped asking but have never found out the answers too? Why cats were thought to have nine lives? Who invents the names of cars? Is there really a maggot in every raspberry? A pot of gold under the rainbow? Is the red you see the same colour red as the red I see?

Go on and on writing a list of as many things you don’t know as possible.

In fact, keep on until you fill a page.

Now take your favourite one, and write the answer.

No, you won’t know it, not exactly.

In fact, you will just have to make it up.


See also:

* How to Write.

20 Things Writing Exercise

Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit is one of my books of the year already, but I've been re-reading it this week for a course I'm facilitating in October. It's even better than I remembered. Underscored already on nearly every page, with stars at the top of pages I think are particularly exciting. If this goes on, I'm going to have to invest in another copy. Today, I took myself off to one of my favourite coffee shops to do this exercise from the book:

Pick a couple and write down everything they do until you get to twenty things. Then study the list and come up with a story about the couple.

I picked two teenage girls who were sitting opposite me - one had kept doing these strange karate chops over her coffee cup and I decided in my storytelling that she was nervous. She knew something about the other girl's boyfriend and she wasn't sure whether to tell or not.

But then Twyla Tharp suggests doing the same exercise with another couple but this time you note only the things you find interesting, 'that please you aesthetically or emotionally'.

As she warns, this took a lot longer. The couple I chose this time looked like a married couple. I noticed he kept touching her, but she kept flicking his hands off. She stared at him though. And laughed loudly at his jokes. When he picked up a paper, she looked over his arm to see what he was reading. He made a meal of reading the paper, of turning over each page slowly and carefully, as if he knew what she was doing.

Twyla Tharp says that when you observe this way 'You might need all day. That's what happens when you apply judgment to your powers of observation. You become selective. You edit. You filter the world through your particular prism.'

What was clear was that I had already started the storytelling procedure as I watched and made notes the second time. I was looking for movements that would fit in with my view. And also that I had picked one person - the man - to tell my story. The first time round, either girl could have been the narrator. It was only when I came to look at my list of their movements, that the one gesture - the chopping hands - sparked the story.

Twyla Tharp says to study the two lists you make this way and look at what appeals to you in the second list.

It was definitely the difference in communication that I saw between the second couple that hooked me. The way they were so close and yet didn't seem to be able to get through the barriers between them. She was trying to reading him almost from inside, while he was feeling her outline. Almost patting her to check she was still there. Was he interested in her, or in what she saw of him? I wasn't sure and that sparked some interest in me.

In the first list when I just wrote down individual movements, I didn't look at how the two girls communicated at all.

TT goes on to say: 'What caught your fancy is not as important as the difference between the two lists. What you included and what you left out speaks volumes about how you see the world. If you do this exercise enough times, patterns will emerge. The world will not be revealed to you. YOU will be revealed.'

What would you rescue?

One of the best writing exercises I do with students is to give them a random object - even a half-used bottle of bubble bath once - and they have to invent the character who would rescue this object above all others from their burning house, and why. It's amazing how the stories come tumbling out. Well, this is definitely something I'd rescue...



I just love looking at it - there's something so soothing about the colours, but also in the texture of the textiles, which is why it hangs just outside my bedroom. It's designed by Anne Kelly, and, because I know Anne, it's been fascinating to see how an artist develops her work through the years and also the influences - travel, family, life - that seem to form a dialogue between her and her work. This is, of course, the same with writing but it takes longer for books to come out, which means its harder to read the clues. And there's always the feeling that, by the end of the book, you aren't the same person who started out writing it. I'm not sure whether it's the same for artists, but I'm interested in that.

And because the picture above doesn't do Anne's work justice, here's something I nicked off her website.