Sunday 1 January 2017

Hyper-Awareness Writing

New Year, new lessons to plan. Where can you take your writers, and yourself? Try writing with the 8 senses. And then follow with an exercise. The senses are an absolutely essential element of creative writing, and a review of them plugs into almost any writing stimulus, any writing level.
 
Ask students to call out the senses. Write them on the whiteboard as they do so. The obvious come first, and then I add three others I've identified. As a demonstration I like to halt everything for a whole long minute for Sound, so we all listen: the hum of a computer, talk in the corridor, drone of a plane, a distant siren, one's own breathing... Invite your students to stretch their senses, along the lines of:

Sound – peel off layers of sound

Taste – temperature and feel of food in the mouth, nuances, memories (and as smell)

Smell – familiar, unknown, indescribable (new combinations of familiar)

Sight – panorama, close-up, middle distance; above, below; colour, texture, shape, pattern; straight, curved, angular; banish the word beautiful – what kind of beautiful?

Touch – feel under fingertips, soles of feet, bottom; hot/cold, rough/smooth; things that touch you (breeze, raindrops, rim of glass); things you touch (yak's coat, palm trunk, kelim rug)

Kinetic – body position:  awkward, comfy, stretched, cramped, turned, straight...

Inner/visceral – body organs, gut reactions:  churning stomach, tight throat, full bladder, scratchy eyes, prickling scalp, gooseflesh, genitals responding (or not)
 
Time – night/day, evening; light, shadow (Monet's cathedral); time creeps, time whizzes
 
The above is Mini-Lecture 2 from the Stimulus section of Creative Writing: the Matrix. Now for an exercise. This is Hyper-Awareness (surprise) which is number 12 in the paperback book and number 13 in the Quick Matrix ebook.
 
After introducing 8 Senses, before a break (coffee or lunch) instruct students to be hyper-aware of all senses, but no other instructions.  On return to class, give one of these writing exercises.
 
  • Sheer observation Bubble and write, describing the café break, using as many of the senses as richly as possible.
 
  • Character-based in two stages.  Tutor, don’t reveal the second stage til the first is written.  Stage 1. Describe the café break as seen by a character who has just had a row with a lover – a paragraph or half-page.  Stage 2.  Same break, same character, but he/she has just declared love and learned it was mutual. Describe the break experience.
Read out and enjoy the sensations. Hope you'll be revelling in rich writing all term!
 
PS To help you through the term there are loads of other teaching ideas and exercises in the archived blog posts here. See the Labels list. I'll be back after spring break.
 
 
 
 

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