8/12/13 Meeting Recap

Prompt for next week:
Take mythos (like Greek, Norse, Chinese mythology, what have you) and rewrite a piece of mythos you choose into a poem or a prose in modern day context.

Welcome aboard, Shane! Our guest today gave us an excellent story to read.

Teachable/Activity:
We wrote complete two-sentence horror story.

My horror story:
"Did you know that sweet old lady who was killed in a car accident?" asked a grandson. His grandmother replied, "Yes, I made sure she died."

It helps you exercise you to be concise in a very short form. Such limitation inspires creativity and brings out horrible side of you. Muahahaha!

8/5/13 Meeting Recap

Prompt for next week:
Take a cue from Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, which tells a single narrative in ninety-nine ways, and write a poem based on what happened just after you got up this morning. Then use one or more of these filters to revise the poem:

  • onomatopoeia (integrating the sounds of your morning into the language of its telling), 
  • litotes (a supremely understated start to the day), 
  • overstatement (embellishing every detail), 
  • olfactory (emphasizing the morning's smells), 
  • tactile (emphasizing the morning's physical feel), 
  • gustatory (emphasizing the morning's particular taste).

7/15/13 Meeting Recap

Activity:
Write two pieces for 10 minutes each, freestyle.
  • A man starts on his journey
  • A stranger walks into a town 
Prompt for next week:
Take what you wrote from activity and write it into a story. It could be an idea, phrase, a character, a setting, or a sentence you wrote in your activity. However you like.

Andrew Stanton: The Clues to a Great Story

Have you wondered how Pixar has become well-known for great story-telling in cinema realm?

7/8/13 Meeting Recap

Prompt for next week:
No dialogue. (Or for those who never done a dialogue before or who are challenged by it, could do the dialogue.)

Activity:
Write a one-line opening to a short bit of fiction. Hand it to the person on your left. Then write a single line to end a story. Hand it to the person on your right. Then, with the two lines you've been given, write the in-between.

7/1/13 Meeting Recap

The prompt for next week:
Pick any two people in any room. One says, "I don't like what you're doing." Continue the drama without revealing the relationship of the two people.

Today, we did a creative kick. On little pieces of papers, we each wrote a bunch of random stuff:
  • A generic character
  • A specific character
  • A location
  • A random thing
  • An event
  • A conflict
Then  we mixed them and we picked one randomly from each category. We wrote our stories using all the components that we picked. This activity makes you get in creative gear to weave all the random components into a story. So do it with your friends! It's fun.