Trigger Exercises
There are many books with similar exercises, few of which are original; they’re shared by writers, added to, manipulated. I note creators wherever a creator is clear; many, however, are so common that they’ve become public domain, like the Ice Capades.
Subject Generation
1. Brainstorm a list of 50 things that interest you. Don’t think. Don’t censor. Just write. The constraint: the “things” must be concrete nouns (computers, feet, cement mixers).
1.1 Brainstorm a list of 50 things you know little about but that pique your curiosity. Don’t think. Don’t censor. Just write. The constraint: the “things” must be abstract nouns (courage, freedom, spirituality).
2. Write the word “On” at the top of a piece of paper, then ad an abstract noun. Make a list of ten “On” phrases or so. Next, choose on or two of those phrases and write an essay. Go. [Variation of Bill Roorbach’s “On . . .” exercise in Writing Life Stories.] Examples: "On Courage," "On Freedom."
3. Open up an encyclopedia, dictionary (an etymological one), almanac, or Guinness Book of World Records to random pages and write down the subjects you hit. Do this 10 to 15 times. Start writing stuff.
4. Open up a newspaper, list random headlines, and write your own stories for them.
Description and Detail Triggers
5. Describe a fruit (dwarf oranges work well) using all the senses (sight, smell, sound, touch, taste) and let your thoughts extend. [Bill Holm/Beth Weatherby. Southwest Minnesota State University.]
6. Describe, in detail, a simple action (for example, sharpening a pencil, shooting a rat) in at least 400 words. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction].
7. Without an instant’s lapse of taste, describe a person (a) going to the bathroom or (b) vomiting. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction]
8. Slow-Motion Exercise. Pick an event (or a simple event from your own writing) and write it for twenty minutes, being accurate to the split second . . . dare to write unusual, bizarre details. [Clive Matson, Let the Crazy Child Write]
9. Painting or Picture Writing. Find a painting, etching, or other work of fine art, and describe what is happening or exists in the art, detail by detail, and let your thoughts wander wildly from the details to wherever your associations take you. This is not about being accurate to the artist’s intentions, to “interpret” the meaning, but to let the images in the painting suggest images your writing. For memoir writing, do the same work with a family picture.
9.1 Movie Writing. Pick a favorite scene from a movie and put it into language, detail by vivid detail. This is good practice from writing scene and avoiding exposition.
10. Object Description. Go and look at some object rarely paid attention to, like a spider web or a dust ball or a pile of dirty socks, and write about its details. Describe with many senses, and let your words suggest further words until a bigger theme, or idea cracks open. Again, as with all exercises, let the writing lead you on rather than you leading the writing. If you wander from describing the details of a spider web to explaining the history of Walt Disneyworld, keep on wandering. Don’t think. Write. Stuff happens.
11. Write a character’s serious defense of him (a psychologist) or herself (a nurse) after he or she has just stolen a Salvation Army change container from the front of a grocery store while the bell-ringer was distracted. Write in first-person; the narrator is speaking to a court-appointed psychologist. [I know I lifted this from someone, but I can’t remember from whom.)
12. Write a two-page or longer character sketch using objects, landscape, weather, etc. to describe and intensify two characters, as well as the relationship between them. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction].
13. Write a dialogue between a cow and a horse as they watch an argument break out between two men who’ve just been in a car wreck on a country road.
14. Two young lovers are walking by a lake, holding hands, and each has a secret they he/she wants to tell the other. Write the internal dialogue of one of the characters as he or she prepares his or her speech. First, write the scene while listening to heavy metal; second, write the internal dialogue while listening to light music. [I think this a variation on the following Gardner exercise:]
15. Write a dialogue in which each of the two characters has a secret. Do not reveal the secret but make the reader intuit it. For example, the dialogue might be between a husband who has just lost his job and hasn’t yet worked up the courage to tell his wife, and his wife, who has a lover in the bedroom. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction.]
16. Overheard Speech. Go to a public place (restaurant, café, coffee shop, Wal-Mart) and inconspicuously record a conversation between two or three folks. Do not manipulate the language while recording; when you return to a “safe” place, rewrite the dialogue, adding flourishes to make the dialogue lead somewhere, i.e. tension, humor. (Bring both the raw notes and the inventive dialogue to class). Don’t put yourself in an unsafe situation; be discreet. [See “Real Talk” exercise on page 86 of Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories.]
17. Describe a landscape as seen through the point of view of a bird. Do not mention the bird. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction]
18. Describe a lake from the point of view of a man who has just committed a murder. Do not mention the murder or death. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction].
19. A young couple are walking arm in arm, the woman with her hand resting casually on the man’s buttock. Write the scene from the “mask” of one writer who finds the scene healthful and innocent, and write the scene again from the “mask” of a narrator who finds the scene disgusting. [Damon Knight].
20. Write in second-person (you) in which you instruct the reader, in detail, to do something socially unacceptable such as going to the bathroom or how to hide from accepting responsibility for a public fart.
21. Write about a pink barn from the point of view of a guy riding a Harley Davidson. Constraint: he thinks it’s pretty. Alternate version. Write a dialogue between the Harley rider who thinks it’s pretty and his buddy Harley rider. They are having coffee and talking about the pink barn.
22. Write from the point of view of someone who is quite removed from your own point of view (different sex, nationality, beliefs). For instance, if you are a middle-class white male from the suburbs, write from the point of view of a Native American woman from a reservation. Etc.
23. Write in the point of view of an old man or woman is talking to him or herself as a child. The child is a real, physical presence, not imagined.
24. Write a scene at a dinner table between three people, using dialogue and description only, in first-person point of view from one of the characters. Begin by describing the food.
25. Write a scene at a dinner table between three people, using dialogue and description only, in third-person point of view. [These dinner table scenes were inspired by Bill Holm in the first creative writing class I took during my undergraduate work. I think he got the idea for the exercise as the class was inspecting a dinner-scene in Faith Sullivan’s The Cape Ann. The exercise evolved into my first published short story.]
26. Describe a barn as seen by an old man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war, or death, or the old man doing the seeing (i.e., “he saw” or “he noticed.”) [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction].
27. Describe a landscape as seen by an old woman whose disgusting and detestable old husband has just died. Do not mention the husband or death. [John Gardner, The Art of Fiction]
28. Imagine a character standing, or sitting alone, in the room you are now in. See the room through his or her eyes and in first-person, from his or her narrative voice, write a page or more of description about the room, without mentioning the character or referring to him in any way, but bearing in mind that he has just had a phone call notifying him of a promotion and a raise. Next, write the description in the same manner, from the same POV, but after the person has just received a threatening, harassing phone call.
29. Describe a dinner party from the point of view of a blind person who is meeting his fiance’s parents for the first time.
30. Secrets List. Individually, generate a list of twenty secrets of the kind you wouldn’t normally tell in polite society (they can be real or made up; no one needs to know). [This is an old standard.]
30.1. Secrets. Group Exercise: From your list of secrets (Ex. 25), choose the five best and write one, anonymously, on a several scraps of paper secrets – one per scrap. These can be made up or not; who’s to know? Dump the scraps into a hat or wastebasket, into which everyone fishes to pull out a secret. Use the secret as the first line of a poem or short story, and write from the point of view of the person who told that secret.
Examples: I’m in love
with my minister.
I
suck my thumb and I’m twenty-five.
30.2. Individually, draw one secret from the box, write it down as the first line of a story and poem, and continue on, writing until you’re exhausted. [These secret exercises are slight variations on a Philip Dacey exercise from a class I took at Southwest State Minnesota University].
31. Make surprising adjective/noun combinations until a certain combination leads into the process of writing a poem or even short story. [Philip Dacey].
Examples: Butter grief
(Dorothy Allison)
Boiled sorrow ( Terry Stokes)
32. Join a concrete noun to a junky abstract noun like "courage," "spirituality," "confusion" to make a phrase like Dorothy Allison's "butter grief." This can help to express meaning beyond the generic. Make two separate lists first and then join the concrete noun to the abstract word that feels natural or unnatural, without analyzing possible meanings. To make this even more fun, make your concrete noun list based on a theme; for instance, I made a list of concrete nouns from stuff you can buy at Menard’s. [I sort of made this exercise up, but not really; it’s an altered version of Dacey’s exercise.] Examples:
plexiglass courage
window-pane melancholy
dead-bolt lock morality
32.1 Turn the joined words into similes: His courage was like plexiglass . . .
Her morality was like a deadbolt lock . . .|
Her
melancholy was thick as a window-pane . . .
32.2 Turn the words
into prepositional phrases:
The window-pane of melancholy . . .
The courage of plexiglass
. . .
The morality of a deadbolt lock . . .
32.3 Use one or a number of the lines you’ve created in the #32 exercises to write a paragraph, anecdote, poem, or story.
33. Marry an abstract adjective that normally describes a human quality to a body part. Make two lists and then join the words that seem appropriate. Use the dictionary or thesaurus to gather as many cool sounding adjectives as you can. [I made this variation up from the Dacey exercises. I don’t know why.]
Volatile chin
Conscientious prostate
Munificent mustache
34. Trigger Poem or Story. From your material in exercises 30-33, select your favorite single line or phrase, title your piece as that line or phrase, use it as your first line, and continue until you’ve written a scene, poem, or anecdote.
35. Make two columns. In each column, make a list of random nouns, a healthy blend of abstract and concrete nouns. . Next, write a comparison using one word from each column. Use the word “is” or “like” to create metaphors and similes. [Variation on “The Old Chinese Restaurant Menu Exercise” from Bill Roorbach’s Writing Life Stories.]
35.1 Select the goofiest sentence from Exercise #30 and use it a first line and write a paragraph, a page, or book.
36. First lines. Free of the obligation to complete a poem or story, simply write out a bunch of first lines that are catchy and non-sensical. Aim for ten to twenty. Examples: A million butterflies rose up from South America [Philip Dacey].
When I was a kid, my nose was always picked
last.
Elvis
Costello is in the sink again.
I always look west when the phone
rings.
36. 1. Select a first line from exercise 36, write it as a first line and then continue the story. [Philip Dacey]
37. First Line Lifting. Swipe some first lines of poems, stories or literary essays that you find engaging and continue on your own. Scan the journals linked from the course home page for this one. List the author and poem/story for each listed line. Always cite when lifting the words of others, even for unpublished exercises.
38. Dictionary Lifting. Find an odd sounding or unusual, maybe not often used, word from a dictionary, write out its definition and continue on with your own definition, and let your thoughts on the subject lead you into a poem, story, essay, or simply forward into the great unknown.
39. Pick a cliché and use it at the first sentence of a story or anecdote.
40. Automatic writing. Just go nuts. Just write. Free associate. Constraint: keep the pen moving. Don’t quit. Don’t try to make sense. Just go. (We’ll do this in-class with music as well.)
41. Copy a favorite poem or prose passage by someone else, word for word. This seems mindless, but it’s actually a form of apprenticeship, helping to make physical the mental/style process of someone else. It’s often wise, then, to begin revising the story or poem once done copying it, with your own flourishes and additions, and see where it leads you. This is not plagiarism; it’s good practice. Imitating the good work of others is a good way to learn how to do good work. Quite possibly, it’s the best way to learn. Carpenters and plumbers call it apprenticeship, and once the apprentice learns the foundations, the apprentice develops his or her own style. Most writers learn this way, too. (Note: If your imitation exercise turns into a completed story, essay or poem, and you decide you want to try to publish it, you must indicate to the editors that it is an imitation, and cite the author and title you imitate. It’s kind of like “sampling” in rap, which is legal, except it’s not always apparent whom you are sampling without being up front about it. If you don’t disclose, you’re plagiarizing.