Be Your Own Editor

Some of you have been following my trials and travails as a participant this winter at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. It’s been a valuable experience not only because of the opportunity it’s provided for a workshop/critique environment, but also for the interesting writing exercises we’ve done each week. Ugh, I hate writing exercises. I hear you. Was I thrilled at the prospect of writing a page describing… a place? No. But that’s the beauty of exercises: they’re not written for publication (or necessarily for anyone else’s eyes at all), so they allow you to free your mind and let loose your creativity.

Now I’d like to see what you all can do with a simple exercise. It’ll take you just a few minutes, and I guarantee you’ll get either an interesting idea or simply food for thought out of it. And if I really like it, you’ll get an autographed hardcover copy of Jonathan Franzen’s acclaimed memoir The Discomfort Zone.

Here’s your deceptively simple task:

Describe a room, house, or other physical setting with as much detail as you can. Best to use a real place. Remember to use all five senses, as well as emotions and other mental associations. You may include a sense of time—when it is that the space is being described (the moment or the era or anything in between) and/or space’s past/future. That said, DO NOT dwell on events, characters, backstory or anything other than pure description of the space. A little straying is fine, but stick mainly to setting. Write approximately 250–300 words.

See, a lot of novice writers focus so much on their plot and characters that they forget to spend much time telling the reader about the space and time in which that plot occurs and those characters interact. Stories don’t happen in a vacuum. But you shouldn’t describe a setting only for the sake of description: in your fiction, setting should play a role, whether it’s reflecting a character’s emotional state, providing details that inform the plot, or simply creating a mood.

In this exercise, you’re to stay away from plot and character as much as possible, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be in your head as you write. Or not: sometimes an interesting setting comes first and the other elements of a story spring forth from it. Be as creative as you can; try to avoid cliches and long lists of adjectives. And don’t think you have to describe the cathedral at Notre Dame or the ruins of Pompeii. I did this exercise using my local drugstore, and I made it sound fascinating. Really. (The lucky winner might just be that writer skillful enough to describe an apartment messier than mine.)

Submit your exercises in the “Reply” field below before May 1, and I’ll post my favorite one and send that writer a signed copy of the Franzen memoir. Now work it, people…

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Writing Classes and Workshops, Writing Contests & Exercises. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.