Hello writers!
I’ve spent some time recording the previous workshops and it has been such fun. It also reminded me that I didn’t get around to sharing this writing exercise with you in July (oops!), but here it is now. Take some time and do this exercise over lunch or after the kids have gone to bed, and bring some happiness and fun back to your writing.
What you need
35 minutes
A piece of paper
A pen
This pinterest board of portraits, and this pinterest board of objects.
What’s the gist of this?
Using objects to bring a character alive is a very fun thing to do - what we have in our bags, pockets, up our sleeves, hidden in drawers etc, is revealing of who we are. This exercise takes it a step further and allows an object and character to prompt us into writing. It’s fun to do when the writing is feeling to serious or difficult. It’s supposed to bring up something weird.
For those who are not going to watch the video, make a list of three things about a character, and three things about an object. Put them into a numbered list where your character things are numbers 1, 3, and 5 and your object things are numbers 2, 4, 6. So if I had a tall, grumpy, freckled man and a round spinning top carved from wood, it might look something like this:
Tall
Round
Grumpy
Spins
Freckled
Carved from wood.
I’d use these as paragraph prompts for my writing.
This is the piece I came up with when I gave myself a few minutes for each prompt. In the video I suggest that you take five minutes per prompt, making this a nice juicy 30 minutes of writing.
He was tall. So tall that it felt at times as though his hair might dust our ceiling, dredging up cobwebs and nasty grime.
Round about the same time we met, I started to have neck problems which meant I could only stare straight ahead. Looking up was awkward, it hurt me, and made my eyes scrunch up in a wince.
I was grumpy about this, but my height wasn’t going to change and neither was his. I became even more ornery when I met Jeremy, this tall man who refused to come down to my level, except when he was spinning that top.
Spinning. It’s such an accurate word for how things felt back then. He’d pull the string and let it loose, and we’d watch it from the bed, both of us naked as the day we were born.
I’d never met someone whose entire body was freckled. Like a constellation I was trying to decode. The spinning top endeared me to him, made me want to know him as a boy. But he gave away nothing.
His heart may have been carved from wood, but his arse was carved from ivory.
Here’s the video
What next
Now that you’ve seen my earless zoom video (lol!) and written your 30 minute piece of character fiction, I’d love to know what was on your list of 6 words, and if you’d like to share your whole piece here, please do!