DREAM : EXPERIENCE THIRTEEN : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

Write about a memorable DREAM - the DREAM that sticks with you.  You can use it as a place to begin.  Start a short fiction story based on that dream.

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018 -2025 Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use in not for profit situations. Please credit me.  It's karma.

WRITING STYLE : EXPERIENCE TWELVE : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

WRITING STYLE

Go to the library and with your eyes closed, pick one book off the shelf in the fiction section.  (re Covid, perhaps this should be the bookshelf of a friend, an open bookstore, or your own shelf of long unread books.)

Take it home and read a chapter from any place in the book.

Reread it again and this time, write trying to write like the author.

Every author has their habits.  Their way of thinking.

To begin getting into the writer's habits and thinking, hand write or hand print the chapter over again on paper.

Then continue.

Christine Trzyna

C 2018 - 2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use in not for profit situations. Please credit me.  It's karma.

*Note that you don't want to publish what you have copied.  That would be plagiarism. 

NATURE : EXPERIENCE ELEVEN : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

Maybe a half dozen people in the entire world that I know about, so to speak, have participated in my WRITING WORKSHOP spawned by recent posts - triggers - to get writing. Search this blog using the words WRITING WORKSHOP for the whole series.

EXERCISE 11

Write a descriptive scene from NATURE.
Then REWRITE IT being sure that you have included excellent color.
Then REWRITE IT being sure that you have included a variety of smells.

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018 -2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use in not for profit situations. Please credit me.  It's karma.

LOTTERY : EXPERIENCE TEN : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

LOTTERY

One million tax free dollars and you have to spend it in 90 days.

Christine Trzyna

C 2018 - 2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use in not for profit situations. Please credit me.  It's karma.

DIFFERENT: EXPERIENCE NINE : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

Write about your first experience of encountering someone of a drastically DIFFERENT view point about religion, politics, or some other controversy.

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use in not for profit situations. Please credit me.  It's karma.

HOUSE : EXPERIENCE EIGHT : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

Design your HOUSE in heaven ; the architecture - interior design - landscaping.

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

ADVICE : EXPERIENCE SEVEN : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

What ADVICE have you given someone else that you yourself would never take?

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use in not for profit situations. Please credit me.  It's karma.

THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY : EXPERIENCE SIX : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

Write a letter to THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

FIVE YEAR OLD SELF : EXPERIENCE FIVE : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

What were you like when you were FIVE YEARS OLD?

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025 Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use in not for profit situations. Please credit me.  It's karma.

TIME TRAVEL : EXPERIENCE THREE : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

Imagine TIME TRAVEL is entirely possible.  You can go back three times.  You can decide to stay only once, if at all.  You'll show up dressed for the times and speaking the language. Where and when would you visit?

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2020  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use in not for profit situations. Please credit me.  It's karma.

WHAT YOU KNOW NOW : EXPERIENCE TWO : CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

"If I had to do it over, I would..."

What DO YOU KNOW NOW?

Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

MEET UP : EXPERIENCE ONE - CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP

 

MEET UP

Think of someone - alive or dead - who you wish you could have a long talk with in a restaurant.  Choose the restaurant, describe meeting them there, the ambiance, the waiter, the food, and then ask them questions.


Christine Trzyna

This exercise is part of a series of writing exercises and to bring up the whole series use the tag Christine Trzyna Writing Workshop. 

C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use in not for profit situations. Please credit me.  Send love my way. It's karma.

COMING UP - A CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP YOU CAN PARTICIPATE IN

 

CHRISTINE TRZYNA WRITING WORKSHOP 

INTRODUCTION

The next ten*** questions or prompts I'll be posting over the next few months as part of this WRITING WORKSHOP are intended to spark your FREE WRITING creativity. 

WHAT IS FREE-WRITING?  Usually this term refers to the FREEDOM to WRITE spontaneously and with the editor shut off in your head.  I believe in this process.

You use your pen - preferable one that flows easily with ink - though I know some of you have never even learned to write cursively or are used to typing on a keyboard or computer.  Whatever is comfortable to you.  But here's the thing about using a flowing pen.  It's best if you barely lift it off the paper.  Just keep going and flowing with the ink. 

The proofreader in you is in the distant future.  So is the analysis that goes on in your head that questions every word as you tend to do when writing papers in college.  It is not genre specific. The results don't have to be useful. You can get off topic. It's OK if you "go against" the assignment.  You don't have to keep your work though I think it's a good idea to read it over or put it away for three months and then read it over again.  You may reread it then and think it was a nice experience but pitch it or decide you're a genius after all!

When I ran a WRITERS ROUND TABLE years ago - before I went to college and studied creative writing - all our exercises were free-writing ones and that turned out to be mostly fun, though sometimes writers ventured into dark areas too.  In groups you must have comfort and be nonjudgmental.  You are not concerned about rules, results, where it's going, a grade, or how to please your professor - or me.

If you are new to this you may want to use an egg timer or stop watch or cell phone timer.  Start with 9 minutes, go to 15, eventually you may be able to free write for hours.  I know I can.  And as a result YOU WILL NOT EXPERIENCE BLOCK because you will learn that you can truly write about ANYTHING ANYWHERE.  (One ex student of mine told me he wrote while laid up with a broken body after an accident.  He turned it into a screenplay and sold it.)  Ultimately, once you are IN FLOW - a state you will experience as different than ordinary life - longer periods of writing time are not only entirely possible but inevitable.

I'm self taught in flow.  I know it came through first being an artist/painter/designer and all those hours I focused on canvas or paper and forgot where I was or what time it was.  Sometimes I think I experience the present as well as the past or future when I work.  Since I wasn't taught how to in a classroom, I know you can teach yourself too.

 Author Stephen King says that writing is HYPNOSIS and having experienced HYPNOSIS I agree.  In FLOW your brain is definitely functioning differently.  Flow happens in all the arts - music (I'm one to think that back in the day Led Zeppelin was in flow in concert.) - painting - crocheting - it seems to me to be tied into the use of the body, particularly the hands but also DANCE.  I suspect that using your LEFT HAND may increase your RIGHT BRAIN abilities.  One thing that happens to me when I'm crocheting is that my thoughts are operating on more than one level at a time; I'm paying attention to what my hands are creating, but sometimes memories bubble up or I have intuitions or some mundane ideas.

Avoid interruptions such as cell phone calls and notifications.  Find a lovely spot, a distant corner in the library, or a circle of friends.  You can share - or not.

If you go through a time of your life in which you are too busy, physically tired, fighting illness, working two jobs, tearing around with the children, this can effect flow. Never the less, once you've learned how to reactivating the state will be easier to get back into after some time away. 

At various book signings and readings and classes I've attended, students often ask the writer about their habits to get a book done.  I've heard every sort of advice, including regular schedules, talking the work aloud while showering,  writing while the children sleep, and writing so many words - a page or word count - every day, which sounds like labor to me. But whatever time you have to write is enhanced by FLOW.

Christine Trzyna
C 2018-2025  Christine Trzyna 
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
OK to use this post in not for profit situations. Please credit me. Send me love.  It's karma.

*** More exercises have been posted.