Adventuring

Longer, more developed exercises which take you into other worlds and metaforaging realms.

All the World’s a Zoo

Scraps of Map

Naming Stones

Subjunctive Starters

Writing Walk

All the world’s a zoo

This exercise involves the writer in thinking of the whole world - objects, places, emotions, words - as an infinite number of animals in a zoo. Each has its names and alternative names, country of origin, its appearance and characteristics, its life-cycle, its habitat, its way of feeding and breeding, its predators and threats. It was developed by the Cuban poet, Nicholas Guillen, who imagined that everything in the world was in a zoo and wrote plaques for various cages e.g.

Hunger
This is hunger. An animal
all fangs and eyes.
It cannot be distracted or deceived.
It is not satisfied with one meal.
It is not content
with a lunch or a dinner.
Always threatens blood.
Roars like a lion, squeezes like a boa,
thinks like a person.

The specimen before you
was captured in India (outskirts of Bombay)
but it exists in a more or less savage state
in many other places.

Please stand back.

Nicholas Guillen

This exercise is one of many described by John Foster in his anthology 'Works 8', an A-Z of poetry ideas for teachers, published by Macmillan 2009.

In 2012, a class of year 9s took a set of abstract nouns - confidence, hope, stress, panic, compassion (idea supplied to Buckinghamshire teachers as writers by Richard Andrews 2010) - and wrote a fascinating series of 'cage-plaques'. Previously uninspired writers became hooked on the power of metaphor.

Further examples by writing teachers:

Gossip
Diet: It eats mainly fools, trifles and half-truths.
Habitat: It lives in classrooms, offices, coffee shops and street-corners where it breeds readily.
Appearance: It is small but noisy and grows quickly. It can be identified by its plumage of secrecy and denial.
Life-span: Generally short-lived , but often poisonous. If bitten, treat with healthy skepticism. Large colonies of gossip are known as ugly rumours.

Whether
Whether is a whistling conjunction – easily mistaken for rain or a castrated ram.
Food and habitat: It thrives on doubts and choices and likes to live in small questions and uncertainties.
It is usually more independent and positive than its trailing companion ‘not’ (as in the sentence: ‘I don’t know whether this makes sense - or not.’)

Sheds
Most common or garden sheds like to huddle by fences, in dark bituminous corners, keeping a safe distance from houses with whom they may be unfavourably compared.
Diet: Sheds eat men, power tools, bikes and spiders, often holding them in its capacious jaws before releasing them years later covered in a saliva called ‘rust’.
Occasionally on allotments you can see an elderly shed, such as Wayne E Lapp, leaning on a water butt and slowly collapsing.

Love
Amor amorphous
Despite experiments to cultivate it with chocolates, flowers or Christmas cards, love thrives best in the wild where it grazes on consideration and common kindness.
Plumage: Its heart-shaped markings mean it is often mistaken for sentimentality.
This rare species is now endangered.

Scraps of map

Using the place names from a map to devise a possible cast list for plays and stories can help writers release their imagination - especially when the names are followed by a few descriptive words.

Bucks and Wembley NWP have enjoyed this exercise. Writing teachers have found it a good way of starting a narrative. 

1. They looked at the names on their scrap of map for 5 minutes and jotted down possible characters - ages - professions - circumstances - relationships - voices. From just the place-name one teacher created a sea captain with 'a jaw like the prow of a ferry.' This was enough of a mental image to launch her into a sustained narrative.

2. Then they chose one to develop for 20 minutes at greater length. 

3. Then they shared and discussed.

Here is one example of the corresponding stages in the process of devising a 'character' from the map in the photograph:

1. Mrs Bunlarie - a cantankerous widow living in Scarsdale Villas - always complaining about the bus stop.

2. "Mrs Bunlarie was annoyed. Tired and annoyed. The letter was not what she expected - not what she deserved. In fact she thought that Dr McManners had no right to send it to her at all. She replaced it in its envelope and stood it on the mantlepiece ..."

3. Some writers felt that it might help to suggest a circumstance or feeling to 'situate' the character. 

4. In repetition of this exercise with NWP Wembley 2017, local maps were chosen. Place names provoked some teachers to write letters to people whom they remember used to live at the locations on their piece of map.

Naming Stones

This is a 15-30 minute exercise for writers to work with others, to look closely at common objects, to handle them, to name them , to explore the allusive quality of names - and to write whatever may be prompted by their shape and surface, heft and texture, or that  may be provoked by talking with others about their observations and associations.

FIRST ... working individually or in pairs, choose three stones from the pile. Handle them. Feel their weights and stroke their surfaces. Investigate their colours and markings. Think of their origins and potential. Why are you attracted to particular ones? How is each distinctive? What stories do they hold? How do such ordinary objects become special through their connections to memories of people, times  and places? (Use geological terms too, if you wish.)

Name the stones. Give each one at least three names. These might be descriptive:
Peep hole Light side, dark side Two face

... or they might be playfully allusive - names dredged up from memory or some other connection you may or may not be able to explain:

Spy Earwax Embryo West country, born and bred Wounded Baldy
Downinthedumps Twisted past Victor Robbie Smith

(these are all names invented by other writers doing this exercise).

Each pair or person writes each name on a slip of paper and places each slip in the relevant envelope. The relevant stone is then placed on top of the envelope. The pair or person passes their stones and envelopes to the person on their left.  Each pair or person repeats the process with new stones: without looking at the previously devised names, each pair or person writes newly devised names on new slips of paper and places each inside the relevant envelopes, replacing the stone on top of the envelope afterwards.
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Repeat the process a third time before each pair or person receives back their originally chosen stones and envelopes. Open the envelopes.

Group ‘introductions’ can now take place – a pair or person may like to  ‘introduce’ a stone to each other – or to the whole group.

NEXT ... using however many of the ‘names’ to help her/him, each writer chooses one of the stones to write about for 10 minutes, including the stones in a narrative, poetry or other form of writing. This is an opportunity to write freely or to use the properties and associations of people, places, moods and foods in an original piece of imaginative writing.

Subjunctive starters

Devise ten sentence starters with a subjunctive stem, ‘if I were...’ Then, taking each one by one, challenge yourself to follow it with, ‘... I would be ...’ and so complete a sentence.

Feel free to vary the pronoun, and to play around with the length of both the stem and concluding clauses - and especially, to subvert whatever you first thought of. Approaching this with attitude can help - perhaps a little grumpiness - and a good old rant can be very therapeutic!

Now choose one of your sentences and free-write for 5 minutes without stopping. And don't worry if you go 'off-task'. The main thing is to keep writing now you've started. It’s a playful way of pinging the elastic of language, and will bring laughs and surprises.

‘If I were a rainbow ... I would arch my back; I would bring promises to sick children.’
‘If I were a walk ... I would stretch across the South Downs from Midhurst to Beachy Head; I would be a stride.’
‘If you were a particle of dust in the museum ... you would dance in sunbeams, before settling with others in dark, combustible corners; you would move from room to room on a feather duster.’
Examples from NWP Whodunit March 2017

Here are some suggested writing prompts - but these could be collaboratively devised, according to the features and freedoms you want for your young young writers. e.g What shall we look out for/ attend to?

Where would the bears have hidden?

What would Hamlet have liked here - and why?

Which scene in your current reading might be filmed here - and why?

What are the scents, sounds, textures and movements that a photo of this place wouldn't catch?

2. Now imagine a scene featuring one of the snapshots above; imagine an overarching mood or feeling (frustration, fascination, fear, anticipation, contentment), and write 9 sentences. As you mull over your ideas, let your mind track backwards, forwards, inwards and outwards from the chosen 'snapshot' - some questions which might excite more thoughts or story-patterning ...

• what had happened the day/month before?

• how did this remind her of a scene from her childhood - or what her mother had said?

• how did this echo events in the 'real' world?

• how would this reappear, distorted, in his dreams?

• who 'took' the snapshot/ who saw or heard this and what were they doing/feeling at the time?

  
  3. The snapshot is accompanied by an illustration/film clip. What are the colours/angles/the sound effects/the mood music? What details are in the foreground - and what, in the background, has significance? What will be the consequences of this scene?
  
  4. Revisit the same scene through the eyes of another character - if you have adopted first person move to third; if you have told this in the present, move to the past. The idea is to dig over the ground of your idea until you have a fine tilth, ready for the planting of a story.
  
  5. Write a list of 9 other characters who might feature in this story - named or unnamed characters are fine.
  
  6. Choose one character and list 9 things that they have in their pockets/ in their suitcase/ in their room; 9 places they have been to in their lives; 9 memories of significance (or collect 9 objects which will feature in the story ... or write a 9-line monologue by that character.)
  
  7. Draw a map of a town/place in this story and find 9 names for roads, rivers, buildings,features and places first from the words you have used - and then from 9 related words: 'Rose Avenue', 'Disappointment alley', 'Whisper brook', 'The Rock building' ...
  
  8. Now find an intersection/cross-roads/place that interests you on your map and write the conversation of 9 lines between two characters who meet there.
  
  9. The book/novel is completed: write the blurb/ the introduction/the acknowledgements or the interview with the author.
  
  10. Now devise the title(s) and 9 chapter headings.