Fiction Warm-up Exercises/Brian Kiteley
A Selection of Fiction Exercises, from The 3 A.M. Epiphany
Published by Writers Digest Books
Copyright Brian Kiteley (clicking on this will take you back to my home page)
1. Synesthesia, according to M.H. Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms,
is a description of “one kind of sensation in terms of another; color
is attributed to sounds, odor to colors, sound to odors, and so
on.” Here is an example of synesthesia from Bruno Schulz’s Street of the Crocodiles:
“Adela would plunge the rooms into semidarkness by drawing down the
linen blinds. All colors immediately fell an octave lower [my italics];
the room filled with shadows, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the
sea and the light was reflected in mirrors of green water.” Schulz
describes a change in color by means of a musical term. Writers
consciously and unconsciously employ this peculiar method to convey the
irreducible complexity of life onto the page. Diane Ackerman (in A Natural History of the Senses)
feels we are born with this wonderful “intermingling” of senses: “A
creamy blur of succulent blue sounds smells like week-old strawberries
dropped into a tin sieve as mother approaches in a halo of color,
chatter, and perfume like thick golden butterscotch. Newborns ride on
intermingling waves of sight, sound, touch, taste, and, especially,
smell.” Use synesthesia in a short
scene—surreptitiously, without drawing too much attention to it—to
convey to your reader an important understanding of some ineffable
sensory experience. Use “sight, sound, touch, taste, and, especially,
smell.” 600 words.
2. Deja Vu.
Write a 500-word sketch of a scene in which a character has an
experience that causes her to recall a startlingly similar past
experience. Juxtapose the two scenes, the present one and the past one,
on top of each other, writing, for instance, two or three sentences of
the present moment, then alternating back and forth between present and
past that way. Show the reader the remembered scene by use of Italics.
Why would a character be haunted like this? Think of a convincing
reason for the deja vu experience. Or don’t
worry too much about convincing reasons—just let some strange set of
events impinge on the present moment of your character. Be playful with
the relationship. Simple advice to beginners: don’t be heavy-handed.
It’s easier said than done, I know, but you can train yourself to relax
and honor your readers with difficult and unusual human patterns of
behavior. Always flatter your readers by proposing a complex and
unexpected reality.
3. The Reluctant “I.” Write
a 600-word first-person story in which you use the first person pronoun
(“I” or “me” or “my”) only two times—but keep the “I” somehow important
to the narrative you’re constructing. The point of this exercise is to
imagine a narrator who is less interested in himself or herself than in
what he or she is observing. You can make your narrator someone who
sees a very interesting event in which she is not necessarily a
participant. Or you can make him self-effacing yet a major participant
in the events related. The people we tend to like most are those who
are much more interested in other people than in themselves, selfless
and caring, whose conversation is not a stream of self-involved remarks
(like the guy who, after speaking about himself to a woman at a party
for half an hour, says, “Enough about me, what do you think of me?”).
Another lesson you might learn from this exercise is how important it is
to let things and events speak for themselves, beyond the ego of the
narration. It is very important in this exercise to make sure your
reader is not surprised, forty or fifty words into the piece, to realize
that this is a first person narration. Show us quickly who is
observing the scene.
4. Body English.
Write a “conversation” in which no words are said. This exercise is
meant to challenge you to work with gesture, body language (or, as a
baseball announcer I heard once misspeak it, body English), all the
things we convey to each other without words. We often learn more about
characters in stories from the things characters do with their hands
than from what they say. It might be best to have some stranger observe
this conversation, rather than showing us the thoughts of one of the
people involved in the conversation, because the temptation to tell us
what the conversation is about is so great from inside the
conversation. “I was doing the opposite of Freud,” Desmond Morris says,
of his famous book The Naked Ape that first studied the ways
humans speak with their bodies. “He listened to people and didn’t
watch; I watched people and didn’t listen.” Because of Morris,
according to Cassandra Jardine, “when
politicians scratch their noses they are now assumed to be lying—and the
sight of the Queen [Elizabeth] crossing her legs at the ankles is known
to be a signal that her status is too high for her to need to show
sexual interest by crossing them further up.” Autistic children cannot
understand human conversation even when they understand individual words
because they cannot read facial expressions, which is clear evidence of
how important other forms of language are. 600 words.
5. The First Lie. Tape-record
a conversation. It’s a tried and true method of understanding how
people talk, but still surprisingly effective. Obtain permission of the
people you are taping. Instruct your group each to tell one small lie
during the session, only one lie. Tell them, if they get curious, that
some philosophers think that deception was a crucial learned behavior in
the emergence of modern consciousness several thousand years ago. You
can participate in the conversation yourself, but don’t become an
interviewer. Let the machine run for a good long while, allowing your
friends to become comfortable and less aware of the tape recorder.
Listen to the tape a day or two later. Play it several times. Choose
some small part of the conversation to transcribe (the lies may be
interesting, if you can spot them, but more interesting should be all
the other stuff they say). Transcribe as faithfully as you can. Do not
transcribe more than one page of talk. After that, fill out the
conversation with information about the people who are speaking, giving
us only details about them that we need to know. The final product
should be no longer than two pages long, double-spaced.
6. Phone Tag. Write
a fairly long, complicated phone conversation overheard by someone in
the room. All three people—the listener in the room, the caller, and
the person on the other end of the line—are involved with each other in
some way (not necessarily romantically). Let us hear the other end of
the conversation, without actually hearing it. This means you will be
giving us only one side of a conversation, so you will have to work to
make the side we’re hearing intriguing and capable of carrying a story.
The listener in the room can guess what the person on the other end of
the line is saying, but try to keep this guessing to a minimum, and make
sure this guesswork is done with integrity—well after the unheard
speaker has spoken. 600 words.
7. Underground History.
Reread your own older fiction—one story or as many as you want to.
Find the ten most common words from this fiction (excluding small and
uninteresting words). Use these words as hidden titles for ten
paragraphs of prose. By hidden, I mean that you should operate as in
the above exercise, but after several rough drafts, eliminate the
titles. Choosing these ten words is obviously going to be somewhat
subjective, unless you have a program that allows you to do some of the
work for you (for instance, you could pick a word that seems to occur
commonly, then do a MS Word global search—the find icon under edit).
This exercise may help you uncover the trends and unexpected subject
matter of your fiction.
8. Backwards. Write a story backwards. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold works
this way, more or less. Murder mysteries are told backwards, in a
sense. Most stories we tell orally we tell from the middle forward
until someone tells us we’ve left out important details, then
we double back. You might try taking one of your own short pieces—or
someone else’s—and simply reversing the sentences. What then? Unless
you’re very lucky, you’ll have to do a good deal to make this reversed
piece of prose make sense. Make sure this does not become simply a
device. The structure should be inherently useful to the material,
which is good advice for any fiction. 500 words.
9. Jointly Held Story.
Speak the beginning of a story with someone else. Choose someone you
know well, who also writes, but that’s not a necessity. Choose a good
storyteller. Do this in a relatively private place, where you won’t be
interrupted. One person starts the story and continues for a few
sentences. The next person continues for another few sentences, and so
on for a while. You don’t need to start up right away after the other
person has finished his or her bit. End when you feel things getting
exciting. Both speakers should go away from the experience and write
down what they remember of the story, but don’t write the tale down
right away. Let it sit in your memories for a day or so. Don’t play
games of one-upmanship with your partner. Be faithful to the growing
story and the characters created on the spur of the moment. Listen to
the other person’s quirks of storytelling. Let someone else’s manner of
creating a story guide you and influence your own story-telling style.
The two stories that result from this exercise ought to be quite
different from one another. 1,000 words.
10. Home. “Some women marry houses,” says the poet Anne Sexton, meaning presumably that these women marry not men but the ideal of house and home. The different etymologies of these two words are instructive. Home originally referred to village or hometown. House
has in its earlier meanings the notion of hiding, of enclosing
oneself. Now house indicates any house, and home is the place that is
central to our notions of ourselves. Use a
home in a story fragment (500 words). Think about the power of rooms
(kitchens, basements, unfinished attics, walk-in closets) on psychology
and conversation. In this fragment, make the house a unique participant
(though a passive one) in the unfolding events. The room need not be
in a typical house. Think about all the other rooms we become familiar
with—classrooms, office cubicles, public
toilets. What are their personalities? How do the more public spaces
we inhabit affect our behaviors? You might consider keeping several
characters permanently stuck in different rooms in a house,
communicating by shouts, cell phones, intercoms, Dixie cups, or
telepathy.
11. In the Belly of the Beast. Describe
an unusual interior space, one with lots of interesting appurtenances
and gadgets sticking out: a submarine, a small plane, a subway tunnel
away from the platform, a boiler room in the sub-basement of a high rise
building. Again, do not yield to the easy use of this scene. The
boiler room, for instance, we all expect to hide a creepy axe
murderer-type. Put two innocent children in it instead, romping and
playing among the glow and roar of the fire and steam vents as if this
were a sunny playground (their father is the superintendent of the
building, and he prefers to keep the kids where he can see them). 500 words.
12. Absent. Construct a character who
is not present. You have many options here: people may talk about this
character before meeting him, or after meeting her; you might choose to
examine what this character owns, how he or she lives, under what
conditions; you might use indirect approaches, like letters or documents
that attest to the existence but not presence of the person. How do we
know of people? Examine the ways we build characters in our minds and
in our social environments before and after we meet them.
13. Ways of Seeing. Imagine
a person with an idiosyncratic way of seeing the world (for instance,
an occasional drug dealer, who, because of his amateur status, is more
than usually prone to seeing danger where there is none; an entomologist
who tends to categorize the world dryly, as if seen through a
microscope; a world-class athlete whose clarity of vision is almost
hallucinogenic). Have this character witness a traumatic event that
does not directly involve him or her. Narrate the event from a
first-person point of view, making sure that the perspective is
carefully built around the idiosyncrasies of this personality. Also, as
a hidden aspect of this character, imagine him or her as some kind of
unusual animal. 600 words.
14. Loveless.
Create a character around this sentence: Nobody has ever loved me as
much I have loved them. Do not use this sentence in the fragment of
fiction you write. The sentence comes from Guy Davenport’s aunt, Mary
Elizabeth Davenport Morrow, via his essay “On Reading” in The Hunter Gracchus.
Resist the temptation this exercise offers for a completely
self-indulgent character. Of course, some self-indulgence will be fun
with this character. But don’t write from inside your own wounded sense
of the world. 500 words.
15. Loving. Write
about a person you love. This apparently simple instruction may be
more difficult than you think. What makes us love people? How do we
avoid being sentimental when describing the attributes that make someone
loveable? You will immediately be faced with the decision of writing
about someone you love or loved romantically or as a friend. Or perhaps
you’ll choose a family member. Your greatest challenge will be to make
your reader love this person, too. 600 words.
16. Improvisation. Put
two characters in a situation that demands improvisation, on both
parts, which also demands that the two characters interact and
compromise with each other in the improvisation. We should be able to
observe the surprise, pleasure, and frustration that result from this
improvisation. Remember that most of life involves one form of
improvisation or another. Beginning writers tend to control their
characters too much, so in this exercise you should work hard to let the
characters surprise themselves as well as you. 500 words.
17. True Feeling. Using
language that is simple and straightforward, describe intensely and
exhaustively a moment of true feeling between two characters. Meryl Streep
says that when she’s researching a character she’s going to portray,
she always gives the character some simple secret that no one on the
set, none of the other actors, and none of the other characters knows
about. Give the character you’re showing us this moment of true feeling
through a secret, but don’t reveal the secret either to us or to the
other character.
18. Teacher. In a 500-word scene, have one character teach another character something that changes the teacher.
But this exercise asks you to go another step beyond the first layer of
reality. It should teach you how to play with more than one level in
your fiction. The teacher learning something from her student is
surprising, though not so unusual as you may think. The audience is
moved by Rose’s tragic learning curve in the movie Titanic.
Imagine how much more interesting the film might have been had Jack
learned something from what he taught Rose, rather than simply dying
handsomely.
19. The Bunny Planet. Rosemary Wells has written a trilogy of children’s books collectively called Voyage to the Bunny Planet.
The basic problem she sets for each book is that a child (in the form
of a young bunny) has a bad day (in prose). Halfway through each little
book, an unseen narrator intervenes and says that the child in question
“needs a visit to the Bunny Planet.” Everything alters in this other
world, first of all by changing to rhyming poetry. The world is better
after we hear the words, “Far beyond the moon and stars/Twenty light
years south of Mars,/Spins the gentle Bunny
Planet/And the Bunny Queen is Janet.” Wells encourages children, in
these wonderful books, to rethink their world, to take an emotional
timeout and find a better world than the one children frequently find
themselves stuck in—chaos, messes, tantrums, sickness, loneliness. What
I want you to do in this exercise is only very tangentially linked to
this trilogy. Use this hinge device that Wells employs so deftly. For
the first part of your 500-word piece, tinge the world in darker hues,
show us a narrative style that reflects frustration, sadness,
alienation, whatever. Then, with a phrase a little like this central
phrase of Wells’s, change
everything—especially the narrative method. Wells goes from a very
dense and quite beautiful prose (almost prose poetry, as the best
children’s literature is) to this light rhyming style (although she does
not stick to one method of rhyme—she uses couplets, quatrains, etc.).
20. The Argument.
Two people are arguing—a man and a woman. They don’t have to be a
couple. Each is convinced he or she is right. You, as the writer, do
not know—and do not want to know—who is right, but you will have
exquisite sympathy for both points of view, both sides of the argument.
How do men and women argue differently? Couples tend to disagree over
relatively minor issues, which often stand for larger issues. Give us
enough background and history, but try to stay in the moment as much as
possible. Narrative PoV is going to matter here a great deal: writing
from one or the other’s PoV is likely to make
it very difficult to show both sides fairly. An omniscient narration
may seem to be the answer, but I don’t like omniscient narration—I don’t
think it’s really possible in fiction about contemporary life. Choose
an accidental arbitrator—a third party narrator, either first or third
person narration. This narrator knows and likes both these people well,
but doesn’t and can’t favor one over the other.� 600 words.
21. Standup. The usual method of the standup comedian monologue is apparently casual connections. For instance, Elvira
Kurt once started a monologue with the simple idea of bad hair. “As a
five-year old, you never had bad hair days. You woke up with hair
straight up, and you said, ‘I look great! I slept in my swimsuit and I
feel wonderful!’ Mother made clothes for me—horrible outfits. She
probably laughed herself to death. I got back at her. When I told her I
was gay I said it was because of those clothes.” Note the deliberate
movement from plain detail to plain detail, with great leaps between the
details—the mother making clothes to the coming-out declaration. We
are not expecting this transition (nor for that matter the simpler
transition from bad hair to mother making clothes). But the transitions
are funny, and they affect us, shock us even in this day and age.
Write a 600-word standup comedy monologue, fitting it into a story
situation you’ve already begun working on. Don’t make it obvious to
your reader that you are doing a stand-up routine—just tell a story as
if you were doing a monologue in front of a smoky, irritable audience,
with a Late Show talent scout scribbling notes at the bar in the back.
22. The Joke. End
a 600-word fragment of a story with a joke you like or loathe. Use the
joke as a way of coloring the whole passage, but don’t just lead up to
the joke. The joke should be relatively short, and it might be better
if the joke is somewhat odd. A guy walks into a bar. He says to the
bartender, “I’ll have one g-g-gin and t-tonic, p-p-please.” The
bartender says, “One g-gin and t-tonic c-c-coming up.” The customer
glares suspiciously at the bartender, who smiles innocently. Another
patron walks into the bar and says, “Scotch on the rocks, barkeep.” The bartender
says, “One Scotch rocks, coming right up.” A moment later he brings
the gin and tonic to the first customer, who says, “You were m-m-mimick-k-king m-m-me.” The bartender, with a truly pained look on his face, says, “N-n-no. I was m-m-mimicking that other g-guy.”
23. Outrunning the Critic. Write
100 short sentences about a character you are working on in a piece of
fiction. The sentences should not connect and should not follow one
another in any logical way. The idea of this exercise is to force you
to outrun your own thoughts and intelligence and critical mind. Be
careful not to be monotonous, using the name of your character or a
pronoun to start each sentence. A better exercise would be to write 200
or 500 sentences about this character, but 100 sentences is still enough of a stretch to make this useful. The idea for this exercise comes from a collaboration the poet John Yau did with a painter, which was to match 1,000 small watercolors with sentences by Yau. John Yau is the author of Edificio Sayonara, Forbidden Entries, and Hawaiian Cowboys, among other books.
24. Rehearsal.
Imitate the method of actors rehearsing a scene, repeating lines and
whole sections of a speech, going over mistakes, etc., with several
familiar characters of yours. Use this social trial and error to find
new, submerged material for your story. You should think of this
exercise as artificial and behind-the- scenes work, but it may also
trigger strangely realistic conversation. Human beings constantly
rehearse and re-rehearse their lines. The anarchic rhythm of
conversation is more akin to a social science experiment than to the
polish of theatrical dialogue.
25. Surprise.
Write a short scene about a character you’ve become familiar with over
time—either your own fictional creation or a character based on someone
you know. Start the scene by letting the character do what you expect
this character to do. But at some point in the sequence of events,
allow the character to do something completely out of character. Let
the character surprise you. This exercise demands that you consider
what is expected and unexpected in a character. You may want to make a
list, behind the writing of this scene, of the kinds of things this
character usually does; and another list of the sorts of things this
character would never do.
