Hi all,
I hope those of you in the middle of exams are doing ok! They’ll be over before you know it, and the summer will beckon…
Some of you may have been at the writing workshop I ran in Kilkenny last month: the group was really great and interactive, and as a result there were loads of exercises I had intended to do that we didn’t get around to. I promised to write a post about them so that people could try them, so here they are!
1. Creation Myth
All cultures have a creation myth, a story that tells us where we came from and who we are. Can you make up your own creation myth? Imagine that there is NOTHING, and then…make something! It’s a hard exercise, but one that really changes your brain.
2. Wordbox
This is based on the way David Bowie wrote his amazing songs, and is really easy to do. Just get a Sunday supplement or a magazine, and cut out all the words in big type. It has to be all for the sake of randomness, not just the ones you like! Then store them in a nice box. Whenever you’re looking for an idea, spread them out and just let your eyes wander over them; when words click, no matter if they make sense or not, write them down and let your ideas flow from there. You can come back to the spread of words as often as you like. There are so many ways to use this tool!
3. Exquisite Corpse
This is an easy game with a crazy name, which many of you have already played: one person takes a blank page, and writes a sentence on it. The last word of the sentence needs to go on the line below the rest of it, like
this;
then the person folds the page over so only that last word is visible, and passes the page to the next person – and so on. When you stop, you’ll have written a poem together.