Prompts

Prompt: Spin

The prompt this week was an exercise in writing spin, the tangle we weave when at first we deceive.

Spin is a form of propaganda, a public relations, marketing, and political writing and speaking style to slant the bias interpretation of news, events, campaigns, corporation stances, and products. Manipulative and deceptive, spin uses cleverly phrased words and phrases to twist the truth. Children caught “red-handed” will often spin a yarn (where the term originates) to exaggerate or obfuscate the truth.

The prompt exercise was to pick a newsworthy topic and report on it three ways to explore the concept of spin. We did this in teams of three but it may be done by an individual.

Write a non-biased report of the topic or news item. Keep to the facts.
Write a negative slant on the topic.
Write a positive slant on the topic.

Examine the words in each.

Which words are neutral?
Which are influential?
Which are inflammatory?
Which was easier for you to write and why?

Spin doctoring, mastering the art of writing and speaking spin, is a craft based upon Socratic Questioning and rhetoric. Socratic Questions is part of critical thinking, asking enough questions to get the listener to think more about the situation, thus your arguments may become theirs as they question their rationale.

Spin writing was also called rhetoric, explained by Plato as an essential part of the “smooth-tongued oration that would inflame passions and distort the truth.”

In “The History of Political Spin (And Why It’s Not So Bad for Us As You’d Think)” on the Washingtonian, the author describes how Teddy Roosevelt used his famous PR strategy to redirect the citizens to a more hopeful attitude in a country starving and suffering.

Roosevelt reinvented presidential addresses, in those days reserved for lengthy speechmaking in honor of national anniversaries, and turned them into almost daily news events. The presidential secretary, whose role had been expanded under McKinley to include the care and feeding of the press, now offered reporters informal sit-downs with TR, even while he was in his barber’s chair—and distributing wax-cylinder recordings of his speeches. The presidential tour around the country to bolster a political point was another Roosevelt innovation.

Neil Rackman’s book, “Spin Selling,” describes the SPIN cycle as an acronym for situation questions, problem questions, implication questions and need-payoff questions.

Writing spin involves answering these questions:

What is the situation and how does it need to change and in whose favor?
What is the problem? Clearly identify it. Then ask yourself, is this really the problem or is it something else? A problem with air quality could actually be a bigger problem if the industry closed down and took its jobs somewhere else.
What is the implication of the situation and problem? Who and what is harmed? At risk? Potentially damaged? Why? Look at all of the consequences.
Identify the need or payoff. Who wins? Who loses? Why? How? Who needs to win the most and why? How do the words chosen sway an opinion or decision toward the desired outcome?

When it comes to writing fiction, we are spinning a tale, taking the reader on a biased journey through their imagination, often leading them down paths they never considered placing a foot, closing the book with their mind stretched into new directions, life journeys altered.

This example of spin explained comes from Shannon L. Alder, author and creator of Shannonisms:

Never give up on someone with a mental illness. When “I” is replaced by “We”, illness becomes wellness.

Famous author, E.B. White said:

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.

The art of spin is popular in movies, “Wag the Dog” is a prime blatant example, but there are more subtle examples, too. In the movie, “Promised Land (2012),” the main character, Steve, arrives in a small town as a top sales agency for a natural gas fracking company. Similar to his own impoverished hometown, he is eager to help the people in this small farming community take this “free money” opportunity to get rich quick. At first, people are eager for his arrival and offers. When a local science teacher objects, they pause and reconsider, allowing an environmental advocate to step in and question their loyalty to generations of farming with damning evidence of the impact of fracking. The town sides with him, yet you feel for Steve as he battles against this interloper. As an audience member, you feel yourself shifting sides throughout the story to the stunning but inevitable conclusion.

We are surrounded by media that specializes in convincing us to buy, vote, and choose one side or the other, rarely giving us a chance to make our own decisions based upon unbiased information.

Even reporting on the same subject, news media is found to slant toward their bias. ScienceNews magazine reported recently on how a computer can now determine bias.

Consider this excerpt from The National Review, an outlet that self-identifies as conservative:

“I’m hitting the road to earn your vote because it’s your time, and I hope you’ll join me on this journey.”

Or this slice, featured by The Nation, which self-identifies as liberal:

“Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion.”

From the quotes alone, you might not be able to tell whether the news outlet is liberal or conservative. But a computer probably can. Scientists developed an algorithm that, after churning through more than 200,000 quotes from 275 news outlets, discovered bias in their quote choice. Creating a graph that grouped media outlets by their selected quotes reveals pockets that pretty accurately reflect the political leanings of the outlets. The research suggests that information about an outlet’s political stripes is embedded in quote choice, surrounding context aside.

“Readers might experience very different personalities of the same politician, depending on what the news outlets they follow choose to quote from that politician’s public speeches,” says Cornell computer scientist Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, a coauthor of the study…Even though readers are exposed to the politician’s own words, “the part of the speech the reader has access to changes,” he says.

Look at the word choices and how they influence your thinking. Learn how to spot them in your own writing as well as use them to sway other characters or the reader.

For more information on writing spin and the art of spin doctors:

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
Philip K. Dick

Prompt: Truth

The following questions were asked this week for the Writers in the Grove Monday morning workshop prompt in Forest Grove, Oregon:

Questions:
Truth.
What is truth?
How do you know?
Does it make a difference who says it?
Under what circumstances?
If it is printed, heard or seen on TV or radio, spoken by someone, does it matter who that someone is?
Did your parents teach you to believe in the tooth fairy? Why?
How did you feel about them later?
Can truth be stretched?
Are there absolutes or only relatives?
Can something hurtful but true do more or less harm than a comforting lie?
Who gets to decide?
What criteria should be used?
Should all people use the the same criteria?
If not, whose should be used and why?
Should you teach your children to believe in Santa?
When you write, what do you owe and to whom?
Why is this a dangerous discussion?

ah, ego

young, slender, wide-eyed fly

overwhelmed by urges

inflates his ego

pumps air to balloon his head

swelling and lengthening

tiny tubes which support his eyes

pumps and pumps

until his head is massive, translucent

and eyes are as far apart

as his life is worth

to impress a mate

thus puffed up, the stalk-eyed fly

struts

to confront another male

meeting head to head

to measure masculinity

by the width-span of their eyes

hot air results worthy of any politician

for the same prize:

the right to screw

his constituency.

mjNordgren

Prompt: 100 Word Sentence

The prompt: A sentence with 100 words. Begin with a simple sentence, then add details, descriptions and modifiers to create a complex, detailed sentence.

The purpose of the prompt was an exercise in exploring sentence patterns and sentence lengths, based upon a presentation at Be Writing Conference in Eugene, Oregon, recently.

We often write consistent patterns. All short sentences. All long sentences. All noun, verb, object, noun, verb, object. Break the pattern by learning to write different types of sentences and sentence structures.

Exploring the Cumulative Sentence

A cumulative sentence begins with a base clause, a subject and verb and an object or just a subject and verb.

The woman sat down to write.
The woman fainted.
The man drove his car.
The child ran down the street.
The bird flew into the window.
She played the piano.
Uncle Edward leaned back in his recliner.
Her grandchild slipped on the ice.

A cumulative sentence adds the description of the action.

Here is an example by Muriel Spark in Memento Mori.

He went to speak to Mrs. Bean, tiny among the pillows, her small toothless mouth ppen like an “O,” her skin stretched thin and white over her bones, her huge eye-sockets and eyes in a fixed infant-like stare, and her sparse white hair short and straggling over her brow.

Add description of things that modify the subject. They clarify the character and move us into an emotional situation. We need the modifiers to describe the person, and their relationship. How does the character see the other person, the scene, the situation. What they see tells us more about the character as they interpret the scene.

Here is another example from William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”

His father struck him with the flat of his hand on the side of the head, hard but without heat, exactly as he had struck the two mules at the store, exactly as he would strike either of them with any stick in order to kill a horse fly, his voice still without heat or anger.

We see the action of the hand striking the head, and we could assume many different emotions, justifications, and reactions, but the modification of the action implies the emotionless nature of the action, and reveals much about the character of the father, that he treats his animals and children equally.

In the following example in Dan Delillo’s “The Names” (Russian to English translation), he describes the wind as a character itself, and how essential the wind is to the story, mood of the story, and the life of the people in the story.

Some nights the wind never stops, beginning in a clean shrill pitch that broadens and deepens to a careless and suspenseful force, rattling shutters, knocking things off the balconies, creating a pause in one’s mind, a waiting-for-the-full-force-to-hit. Inside the apartment, closet doors swing open, creak shut.

Consider how the sentence travels? Does it incorporate backstory, create emotion, rhythm, pace. Sometimes the force of a sentence’s pattern and rhythm takes you to an intense place or state of emotion. This is very useful to moving the story forward and pulling the reader along, consuming each word, eager for the next, feeling what the character is feeling.

Use a cumulative sentence pattern as you wish, or not, in your writing, but learn how to recognize them and work with them. They can break up your short sentence pattern, add more to the story, and describe a moment to bring the reader there with you and the character.

This prompt is meant to explore the boundaries of how we normally write.

The Prompt

The prompt assignment:

Write a modifying cumulative sentence. Start with a noun, verb, and object, then modify it to a minimum 75 to 100 words [pick one].

An alternative for those handwriting and not willing to count, write at least 10 lines handwritten on typical school notebook paper.

This typically takes about 10-15 minutes – most of us write 400 to 600 words in our prompts, some more.

Prompt: Character Secrets and Relationships

The following prompt comes from the must-attend Be Writing Conference in Eugene, Oregon, presented by the WordCrafters writing group. It is a two part prompt and works best when done with a partner, though it may be done alone.

With your own character or select a personality or behavior characteristic from list one and a job description from list two and write about the resulting character using the prompt under these two lists:

List One: Personality and Behavior Characteristic:
- Pyromaniac
- Abused
- Humiliated
- Convicted
- Egotistical
- Kleptomaniac
- Lying
- Time Traveling
- Barbaric
- Bigoted
- Suspicious
- Curmudgeon
- Pompous
Job Descriptions:
- Kindergarten Teacher
- Doctor
- Baker
- Dairy Farmer
- Grocery Clerk
- Nurse
- Mother
- Truck Driver
- Housekeeper
- Janitor
- Accountant
- Lawyer
- Bank Clerk

Describe the following for your character, keeping it fairy concise:

Name.
Description as if pointing to the person across the room.
Where does this person spend the majority of their time and why?
What is their deepest secret, something they might never tell anyone including their best friend?

The next step is to either do another character or do this with someone else.

Share your characters with each other described in one to three sentences.

Answer the questions:

How would these two people know each other?
How did they meet?
What do they have in common?
What is there relationship? Is it friend, acquaintence, co-worker, family?
How does this relationship change your characters?

Prompt: Being Brave

The prompt this week is from Pat Schneider’s book “Writing Alone and with Others,” a book we use as one of our key guides for our writing group. The exercise on being brave.

Write something that feels too huge, or too dangerous, to tell. Courage is not the special prerogative of those who have experienced some dramatic suffering. It is a part of the human condition, related to the danger and the suffering we all experience. Once a writer friend said, when she learned that I had been in an orphanage as a child, “Pat, you are so lucky! What hurt you is so clear and obvious!” She grew up in a proper home where church and community kept things in order. How do you find what went wrong, when the table is set with silver and the candles burn and everything is so proper? It takes courage – perhaps more than for those of us who have dramatic material in our background.

The following poem, of which this is an excerpt, served as the prompt example You may read the whole thing on Google Books for free.

The poem was written by a young woman in Japan during one of Pat’s workshops there. The woman is C. Misa Sugiura and speaks of the shame a child feels when ridiculed, focusing on the poet’s attendance at an elementary school in the United States.

When I was little,
people laughed at me
and called me
flatface.
They pulled their eyes into
slits
and said,
“Me Chinese!”
and laughed.

I didn’t know my
face was flat
so I went home
and looked in the mirror
to see…

So I went to school
and said, “I’m Japanese and
my face
is like yours,
isn’t it?

And they said,
No.
It isn’t!
It’s flat like a pancake.
Me Japanese pancake-face!
And they laughed.

And I went home again
and looked in the mirror
and I cried because
they were right.

Prompt: Forget About Today Until Tomorrow

From Mr. Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan:

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Prompt: Limerick

The prompt this week was to write a limerick. A limerick is a poem style that gained popularity in the early 18th century and has a strict form and rhythm. It is such an accepted form of poetry, many can finish the last line if the writing compels them to do so with rhythm and rime.

According to Wikipedia:

Limerick is a form of poetry, especially one in five-line, predominantly anapestic meter with a strict rhyme scheme (AABBA), which is sometimes obscene with humorous intent. The third and fourth lines are usually shorter than the other three.

According to some experts, a limerick isn’t a true or pure limerick unless it has an obscene element, and that clean limericks were just a “passing fad.” Edward Lear (19th century poet) truly popularized the form and was published in the papers, though he claimed these were not limericks.

An example of an early form of limerick by an unknown author is:

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

A limerick consists of the standard form of a stanza of five lines. Using the measurement of a “foot” as the limerick’s meter and pattern, it is ta-ta-TUM, an anapaest. The first, second, and fifth rhyme with each other and have three “feet of three syllables each.” The third and forth lines are shorter and rhyme together with two “feet of three syllabus.”

The storytelling order of a limerick is:

Introduce a person and a place, with the place words at the end of the first line.
Line two continues the action, and rhymes with line one.
The third line sets up the “fall” of the person and is short and sets up the rhyme for the next line.
Another short line continues the action and rhymes with the line above it.
The last line is the punch line, and rhymes with the first and second lines. Sometimes this is a repeat of the first line through a twist of works, but not always.

One of the most famous examples of limerick forms is:

There was an Old Man of Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
His daughter, called Nan,
Ran away with a man,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
– Anonymous

The prompt was to write a limerick. Play with rhymes and storytelling, and attempt to create a twist at the end.

Prompt: The Haven

The following prompt comes from the book “Beasts in My Belfry” by Gerald Durell from chapter 2, “A Lust of Lions.” The following describes an official building at Whipsnade Zoo in the UK, one of the first zoos to attempt to provide “natural” quarters for their wildlife, and his adventures as a young man working there, determined to become a wildlife specialist.

The nerve centre of the section was a small, tumble-down hut hemmed in by a copse of tangled elder bushes. The hut wore a toupee of honeysuckle at a rakish angle, practically obscuring one of its two windows and so making the interior dark and gloomy. Outside it sported a battered notice-board on which was the euphemistic title “The Haven.” The furnishings were monastic in their simplicity – three chairs in various stages of decay, a table that rocked and jumped like a nervous horse when anything was planed on it, and a grotesque black stove that crouched in one corner pouting smoke through its iron teeth and regurgitating embers in quite incredible quantities.

The prompt was to describe something, preferably an inanimate object, using anthropomorphic descriptions. Make us see the character of the thing.