what if?
When it rains I can’t help but want to obsessively listen to Rain by Tones on Tail.
I’ve been experimenting with writing style and structure as of late. I really enjoy doing all of the exercises from the following books.
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What if? by Anne Bernays & Pamela Painter
Spunk & Bite by Arthur Plotnik
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Yoga for the Brain by Cheryl Miller Thurston
The Art of Fiction by John Gardner (recommended by Bob Fisher writer of Wedding Crashers)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss (recommended by NY Times Bestselling author Jen Lancaster)
The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White
Story Structure Architect by Victoria Schmidt, Ph.D.
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I’m going to do the following exercise over several blog postsâ¦hopefully within the week. This exercise was taken from the book What if? from page 31.
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Choose a central dramatic incident from your life.
Write about it in first person, and then write about it in third person (or try second person!). Write separate versions from the point of view of each character in the incident.
Have it happen to someone ten or twenty years older or younger than yourself.
Stage it in another country or in a radically different setting.
Use the skeleton of the plot for a whole different set of emotional reactions.
Use the visceral emotions from the experience for a whole different story line.
THE OBJECTIVE:
To become more fluent in translating emotions and facts from truth to fiction. To help you see the components of a dramatic situation as eminently elastic and capable of transformation. To allow your fiction to take on its own life, to determine what happens and why in an artful way that is organic to the story itself. As Virginia Woolf said, “There must be great freedom from reality”.
Soâ¦I’m going to try to do this daily but I’m going out of town and I can’t promise. I’d love to see what you come up with. Please post it by blog, not email.
