Fri 1 Jan 2010
This is a great warm-up exercise to writing that we did in class. Not for the ambidextrous.
All credit to Amanda Rackstraw, my writing tutor.
Take some time to clear your mind and I know that is about as easy as it sounds. If you are not the meditative kind, it may still help to close your eyes and focus on your relaxed breathing. If you have a thought, recognise it and try, literally, to push it out of your head. Acknowledge your thought and decide this is not the time. It may take some practice (and if you become accomplished at it may also work to calm your thoughts and fall asleep better).
Clear your mind and take your favourite writing utensil. Take that utensil in your non-writing hand, yes, you heard me, your non-writing hand. And draw. Don’t set out to draw or think too much about it. Just put utensil to paper and form a shape. Don’t think what that shape should be or what the shape is becoming. Just make a shape. It can be as small or big as you want it to be. It can take up a few lines of paper or a whole page. Just draw. When you’re done, look at the finished shape and recognise what it is. Still with your non-writing hand, write down next to the shape what the shape is. Then keeping the shape and its name in mind, and also still with your non-writing hand, think about where the shape is and why the shape is interesting in context of its function or location or circumstance. Keeping your utensil in your non-writing hand, write a descriptive sentence that has to do with your object.
Now you can take your utensil in your writing hand and write the scene or story that started as a shape on the page and turned into words or scene in your mind.
Luna wrote;
It was a noise like crackling.
These hands were not my own, but they had an urge to cover ears. The noise was eerie and did not seem to accompany the swaying movement that my eyes saw. It was a narrow path that we walked along. The sun was out, but could only manage a watery light with hardly any warmth. The warmth that we felt did not come from the sun. It came from the direction of the crackling.
The crackling by LunaLouise is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.