Heather Sellers, the Practice of Creative Writing, Second Edition

Heather Sellers, The Practice of Creative Writing, Second Edition

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Additional Practices/Projects

CHAPTER FOUR: Images

Additional Practices/Projects

Practice

Review your work from the semester. Where did you use images? Where could you have used an image instead of what you did write? How does replacing that part of your piece with an image improve it? What’s lost?

Practice

Go back through the readings from the beginning of the semester up to the present. Highlight (or create a list of quotes) that transport you. Every passage that transports you to the action/situation/place in the writing. What do you notice about the writer’s technique when it comes to images? Do different writers have different “tricks” for making the reader “see a movie in their mind”?

Practice

Analyze your favorite book from childhood, from another class, from your summer reading, or from your personal library. Does this writer use images? How often? What kinds of images? Try an imitation of this writer’s image-making tactic by scaffolding a scene that is particularly rich and evocative for you.

Practice

Bring in photographs. Trade, so that you are using photographs from someone else’s life. Write, from the point of view of the photographer, what’s going on in this image, in real time, as she/he (the photographer) is experiencing it.

Practice

Do Robert Olen Butler’s anecdote exercise, detailed in his book From Where You Dream. Basically, a student tells the class an anecdote—what she did this morning, what she did last night—and each time she moves out of real time and into summary, generalization, interpretation, analysis, the class must interrupt her, and get her back into the image, the moment.

Project

Take an image, any image, from any of the work you’ve done so far. Something alive, and intriguing; small groups can help locate the images in peer work. Using that image as a prompt, write a definition poem, a short-short story, a 250-word essay (for examples, see Lopez or Miller in the book), and a one-page dialogue, letting the image go wherever it goes in each different genre. It’s fine—encouraged even!—if new characters come on stage or different people altogether narrate from this image.