Start Your Story (Or Get It Rolling):

I am going out of town for a week to visit my son. This is causing a small change in the schedule, which I hope will not be a problem for you. Next week's homework, the homework for this session (Session Three), has a delayed due date. It is due Monday Night, November 9 (instead of Sunday night, November 8). Session Four will be posted a day late, on Tuesday, November 10 (instead of Monday, November 9). This all to take into account the reality that I will not be able to post or retrieve the work till late Monday or early Tuesday.

Home work for Session Four, however, will be due at its regular time, on Sunday night, November 15.

I hope that makes sense!

 

We're going to begin this session of the tutorial by...

 

Thinking about Our Personal Writing Process

I wrote a little last week about process and product in general— especially the importance of separating process and product. This week, I want to focus on our personal process of writing and if it is working for us or needs tweaking.

One way to think about this is to think about how you came to your commitment to writing. Some of us began to write as small children, as a form of play. Others discovered an interest and talent during high school or college, or when we retired. Begin with this exercise:

 

Exercise 1: Write your autobiography as writer. This can be as short as a paragraph, or longer, if you find it useful. The idea is to think a little about what drew you to writing. Was it books you read or a teacher who once praised a poem you wrote? Try to go as far back as you can, and to bring it as close to the present as possible.

Exercise 2: Write a short aspirational future-ography of your life as a writer. This exercise is obviously fictional, and meant to be let your imagination and dreams go free (you don't ever have to show it to anyone!). Write what happens next to you as a writer. And after that??

Dreaming is fun, and having secret ambitions is something we all need, but practically speaking, to write fiction or any other prose usually requires finding a pattern of work time and a place to sit down and write. Sometimes inspiration alone will force you to your desk or to pull out your notebook, but you can't depend on that for writing any kind of lengthy prose fiction, whether personal essay or novels or stories or memoir. You have to establish a time and place that works for your schedule and your personality.

What matters, in my opinion, is the regularity and probably a comfortable place conducive to your work. This is wildly different for different people. I have a student in an NYU class this semester who drafts in the note-taking app on her smart phone. One member of this tutorial indicated that she works best at midnight. Other people like to wake up and write while they are still near their dream state. Yes, of course, you can grab whatever time you can— lunch hour today, an hour on Saturday morning next week— and that may work for you, but generally, prose writers need some stability. If you find the right time/place for yourself, the very arrival and settling in there will be a large part of the process. You will sit down, or curl up, or close the blind or turn on the laptop or take out the special notebook— the small actions of settling in become the discipline, put you into creative mode.

I'm one of the flannel-nightgown-cup-of-coffee please-don't-speak-to-me-yet people. I have arranged my life so that much of my teaching happens in the evening and I have several mornings a week when I can go straight to writing. I have a top floor room I use for an office with my computer and a view of town and a hill beyond. Sometimes my first hour goes to email and business and journal writing, but at some point, the act of typing seems to set off something in me, and I slide over into the novel I'm working on. I like to go deep into what I call "that place," and work intensely for maybe 45 minutes, maybe an hour or an hour and a half. Then I take a walk with my Nordic walking sticks and maybe have lunch or do business of one kind or another. I try to get in an afternoon session (on days with no teaching or other activities in the PM). Afternoons are especially good for editing. I find them more problematic (for me!) when I try to write new material.

The point here is emphatically not to offer my process as a model, but to say everyone has to find her or his own process.

Exercise 3:  Write a short description of your process as it is now, emphasize the place or places you like to write.

Exercise 4:  Write a short description of what your process (and your place) were like the most productive time you ever had in your writing life.

Exercise 5:  What might you do to enhance your writing process?

 

More Places

We've been talking about real places that encourage your of writing.

Places are also, obviously, of importance in what you write. Consider first a couple of real places in your life that might jog your memory for memoir writing or a new scene in your fiction. If you have never written about places you knew as a child, this is a good opportunity to try. If you are already writing at length about real places you knew as a child, try some place you knew well as an adult: an apartment, or a place where you worked.

Writing of childhood places is important because it can tap into the incredibly sharp senses we all had as children, when everything was happening for the first time, and we were like little sponges and vaccum cleaners sucking up experience and images.

 

 

Exercise 6:  Make a list of the the addresses of all the places you have lived. If you are a person who has moved a lot, choose the five most recent places or the ones where you lived when you were a child, or when you were first married, or whatever. What matters in this assignment is the addresses: Simply list addresses or some identifying factual description (the small yellow house at the end of Powerhouse Road).

Exercise 7: This list is a good source for a poem or a short prose passage. For this exercise, choose one of the places and use its address as the title. Then, in poetry or prose, describe the place— include the color or material of the building/house; its setting. Then go inside and do the same for a room—maybe go on a short tour of the place— use your senses for smells and textures, and feel free to follow a memory that pops up.

Exercise 8:  Turn the list into an essay using several of the places: "I've lived in only a few houses in my life..."

Exercise 9: Pretend you are a blind person or an animal like a dog whose primary sense is smell. Describe a place you have been, indoors or out (it might be but doesn't have to be, one of your addresses) and explore the place emphasizing one sense other than vision.

Exercise 10: Do the same exercise, but make up the place. Share your exercises with someone. Can they tell the remembered from the made up place? Hint: concrete sense details make us experience what you experience.

These exercises are not about place description for itself. Place description is useful and even necessary in writing to let a reader know facts and to set a tone, but these exercises are about using the senses to take you the writer (and, later, the reader) into a world of imagination or the past. Nothing moves the imagination deep into a scene or a memory faster than the senses.

Try this next one to expand/deepen a novel or story or to start one, or to go back in time to a memory:

 

 

Exercise 11: Close your eyes and think of a place, either real or imagined for a scene in your fiction. Take your time, breathing deeply, and going into the place with a visual overview first, then moving closer and perhaps noticing odors (something cooking? a salt breeze?), and touch sensations (that breeze? heat? a rumbling subway underfoot?). Move deeper into the scene and touch something with fingers to get texture, and if there's food, taste it. Let your memory/imagination do this for a while, then write. You may or may not use all the material you experienced in your imagination. Write down what you want, and then go on to write what happened there.

 

Exercise 12:  Do the same thing, but rather than you going into the place and sampling its sensations, have a character from your fiction (or create a character) to do it.

 

We'll do some more work with the senses on characters next session.

 

That's it for this week!

 

 

                                                                               –Meredith Sue Willis

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The Way the Class Works

Each week there will be between 5 and 10 writing assignments for you to try or ignore as you please. The assignments are exercises aimed at getting your narrative imagination in gear—and rolling forward. You don't have to write all the exercises, although if you did, you would amass quite a bit of work by the end of the tutorial.

Write as much as you can, but send me an average around 1400 words a week, with a limit of 7000 words for the entire five weeks.

As you know, the course is completely online and consists of the weekly assignments plus the personal weekly feedback from the teacher. With hard work and a little luck, a tutorial like this will give you several good starts on prose narratives— stories, novels, memoir, etc. or, if you work on one project, up to 30 new or revised pages of a draft.

For those of you already engaged in a project, the assignments can enrich and add material. Also, if you prefer, you may substitute sections of the ongoing work for the assignments. You may send more or less each week, but keep in mind the total limit for the five weeks.

Send the homework to me at MeredithSueWillis@gmail.com by midnight of the due date— Session One homework is due by Sunday night, October 25, 2015. Send the homework attached to an e-mail as a Word or Rich Text file. If this is a problem for you, e-mail me, and we'll work something out.

What is the Difference Between a Tutorial and a Class?

My online classes have longer, lecture-style essays and more readings, and they cost more. These tutorial "lessons" are stripped down, primarily lists of starters and exercises. The focus is, as always, on your writing and my responses to your submissions.

 

 

 

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