I am in Maine to begin my MFA program. I arrived a couple days early to shift my body to east coast time. Yesterday I walked downtown and sat to write.

When I return to Korea I am covering a maternity leave. One of the classes I’ll teach is creative writing – I’ve missed teaching this course and had fun planning. One of the books I pulled material from is Writing Alone & With Others by Pat Schneider, and yesterday I practiced the following exercise from memory. Which means I didn’t do the exercise exactly.

Take a small bit of writing – a page or so – from your journal. Or write a straight narrative account of something that happened to you. (Give yourself only five or seven minutes to do this, and write fast, without editing). 

When you have finished, put it aside, and without looking at it, begin again to write the same narrative. Do not look back! Allow yourself to say exactly the same words if they come to you, or to change it in any way you wish. After a bit, introduce into the narrative an object that was not there in the first draft, and that was not there in your memory. Make it completely imagined. Go on writing the narrative for a bit, and then introduce a character (again, completely imagined) that wasn’t there, and give him or her a significant place in the narrative.

This is fun – and for many people it simply magically erases the big problem of how to break out of literal memory into imagined scenes and characters.

I wrote for a couple of hours. What I did was quick write the narrative. One block page. Then I rewrote this narrative twice, introducing a new object in the second telling, and playing with dynamic between the two characters in the third. The point is to get comfortable pulling from life, turning fiction. Successive rewrites are a constraint too, pressing your creativity to work with your immediate imagination – one, two, three – rather than giving space between drafts. Successive rewrites are also a challenge to keep yourself interested as you write. I like the way I finally describe the salt rimed sidewalk, and the subtle (uncomfortable) conflict of the third draft.

Try this by way of Schneider’s original exercise, or with my accidental modification.

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