Last Saturday, I spent the day in a writing workshop with Sarah Seleky. Her focus is on writing from deep inside, to find the story instead of planning what to write. We worked through a series of exercises that felt peculiar and yet were oddly effective.
In one exercise, Sarah gave us a noun and then asked us to sit with it until another noun came to mind that was completely unrelated. No apple-ball or apple-poison allowed. Then she asked us to chose three of our word couplets and turn each into a metaphor or simile, taking these completely unrelated things and relating them.
One of mine was magpie (her word) and plum (my word). My result: The baby magpie was dark and round, a plum of a child.
We continued through the day, through writing prompts that forced us, over and over, to simply let the words flow through us. Sarah recommends always writing this way, in what she calls drift.
I asked about writing for children, and the need for a tight core to the story. She asked the age of the kids. Elementary, I answered. So it can’t be meandery, she said. Exactly. Her recommendation was to write a meandering first draft, and carefully edit it after.
Now I have to figure out what to take from this workshop. I tend to work in this way some of the time, but not right through a first draft. That’s resulted in massive rewrites, which I hate.
Absolutely hate.
I have a file of story tidbits – I think I’ll use these as writing prompts to work with Sarah’s techniques, and see how that seeps into how I work on longer projects.
Maureen