prompt

Prompt: Generalizations

The prompt this week was on stereotypes and sweeping generalizations. The comment “all red heads have fiery personalities” labels all red heads, but when applied to the individual may not be true.

We discussed stereotype and sweeping generalization examples and how and where they are applied.

In writing, the inclusion and use of stereotypes and sweeping generalizations are also called characterization frames. When used well, the adjectives that define these stereotypes help the reader to make quick judgment calls about the characters. When used expertly, generalizations set the character up for conflict, with others and themselves. An Asian student struggling with the Asian F demand by parents and culture to get only A or A+ (and anything less than that like an A- is considered an F), may uncover a learning disability which puts the character in conflict with expectations of scholastic achievement within themselves, with their family, with the school system expectations and assumptions, and within their society. A fiery redhead who becomes a quiet librarian, encouraging an antagonist to “light the fire within.” A redhead deals with societal preconceptions and expectations on a daily basis, and such pressures are felt internally as well, as they attempt to live up to those assumptions.

Stereotypes are typically defined by the following:

  • culture
  • expectation
  • adaptation
  • conflict
  • dos/taboos

Culture sets attitudes and expectations about behavior, manners, etiquette, and relationships such as no sex before marriage, the wearing of the hijab, length of skirt, bowing as greeting or handshakes, language usages, etc. We expect certain behaviors within groups and societies, as a large encompassing group or within a small social circle. As we enter a new group, we use cultural norms to start, the expand what are acceptable behaviors within that group, such as a group of high school girls hanging out in the bathroom smoking, trusting the others not to tell on them. People moving into those circles must adapt, or conflict, avoidance or the accepted response in a conflict situation. Teens outside of the smoking girls group learn quickly how to behave around them, even though they are not part of the group. They support the group behavior. Thus, it becomes a social norm and expectation, and conflict arises when they are challenged.

The dos and taboos of a group or society dictate attitude, behavior, and define those social norms. These come in many forms from the innocuous, the choice to wear white shoe in winter, to the dangerous and threatening like road rage.

A character’s actions often define stereotypes, as does their language and thought process. How you choose to use these helps to craft and frame your character.

The prompt is to find a character that is part of a “group” and write about them. What group are they a part of? What are the expectations, behaviors, dos/taboos, and cultural impositions about that group? How does the character behave within that framework? Let us see them in a situation where these sweeping generalizations are challenged, helping us see deeper into the character’s story and development.

Prompt: I Am From

The prompt this week came from George Ella Lyon in a poem called “Where I’m From.”

I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
I am from the dirt under the back porch.
(Black, glistening,
it tasted like beets.)
I am from the forsythia bush
the Dutch elm
whose long-gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.

I’m from fudge and eyeglasses,
from Imogene and Alafair.
I’m from the know-it-alls
and the pass-it-ons,
from Perk up! and Pipe down!
I’m from He restoreth my soul
with a cottonball lamb
and ten verses I can say myself…

Read the rest of the poem and write a description of who you are starting each line with “I am from.”

Prompt: Fear

The prompt today is to write a short scene where someone is afraid.

The example came from Ken Follet’s book, The Hammer of Eden:

Judy had been in one major earthquake.

The Santa Rosa earthquake had caused damage worth $6 million—not much, as these things go—and had been felt over the relatively small area of twelve thousand square miles. The Maddox family was then living in Marin County, north of San Francisco, and Judy was in first grade. It was a minor tremor, she knew now. But at the time she had been six years old, and it had seemed like the end of the world.

First there was a noise like a train, but real close, and she came awake fast and looked around her bedroom in the clear light of dawn, searching for the source of the sound, scared to death.

Then the house began to shake. Her ceiling light with its pink-fringed shade whipped back and forth. On her bedside table, Best Fairy Tales leaped up in the air like a magic book and came down open at “Tom Thumb,” the story Bo had read her last night. Her hairbrush and her toy makeup set danced on the Formica top of the dresser. Her wooden horse rocked furiously with no one on it. A row of dolls fell off their shelf, as if diving into the rug, and Judy thought they had come alive, like toys in a fable. She found her voice at last and screamed once: “DADDY!”

From the next room she heard her father curse, then there was a thud as his feet hit the floor. The noise and the shaking grew worse, and she heard her mother cry out. Bo came to Judy’s door and turned the handle, but it would not open. She heard another thud as he shouldered it, but it was stuck.

Her window smashed, and shards of glass fell inward, landing on the chair where her school clothes were neatly folded, ready for the morning: gray skirt, white blouse, green V-neck sweater, navy blue underwear, and white socks. The wooden horse rocked so hard, it fell over on top of the dollhouse, smashing the miniature roof; and Judy knew the roof of her real house might be smashed as easily. A framed picture of a rosy-cheeked Mexican boy came off its hook on the wall, flew through the air, and hit her head. She cried out in pain.

Then her chest of drawers began to walk.

It was an old bow-fronted pine chest her mother had bought in a junk shop and painted white. It had three drawers, and it stood on short legs that ended in feet like lions’ paws. At first it seemed to dance in place, restlessly, on its four feet. Then it shuffled from side to side, like someone hesitating nervously in a doorway. Finally it started to move toward her.

She screamed again.

Her bedroom door shook as Bo tried to break it down.

The chest inched across the floor toward her. She hoped maybe the rug would halt its advance, but the chest just pushed the rug with its lions’ paws.

Her bed shook so violently that she fell out.

The chest came within a few inches of her and stopped. The middle drawer came open like a wide mouth ready to swallow her. She screamed at the top of her voice.

The door shattered and Bo burst in.

Then the shaking stopped.

* * *

Thirty years later she could still feel the terror that had possessed her like a fit as the world fell apart around her. She had been frightened of closing the bedroom door for years afterward; and she was still scared of earthquakes. In California, feeling the ground move in a minor tremor was commonplace, but she had never really gotten used to it. And when she felt the earth shake, or saw television pictures of collapsed buildings, the dread that crept through her veins like a drug was not the fear of being crushed or burned, but the blind panic of a little girl whose world suddenly started to fall apart.

Why is this so effective? What makes you know a six-year old is terrified?

Create a scene in which someone is terrified.

Prompt: My Yoni

Poem by Samantha Reynolds with image of an old woman.

The above and poem below is by Samantha Reynolds, with photo credit to Ritta Ikonen and Norwegian Photographer Karoline Hjorth.

My Yoni

I Am Not Old
I am not old…she said
I am rare.
I am the standing ovation
At the end of the play.
I am the retrospective
Of my life as art
I am the hours
Connected like dots
Into good sense
I am the fullness
Of existing.
You think I am waiting to die
But I am waiting to be found
I am a treasure.
I am a map.
And these wrinkles are imprints of my journey
Ask me anything.

Spend a moment gazing at the photo.  Consider the possibilities:

  1. Who is your Yoni?  Describe.  Tell about a time you spent with her.
  2. What does it mean to age?
  3.  Who are you?  Do others see you as you see yourself?
  4.  What lands on Yoni’s nest?  Who lives on (or in) Yoni’s head?
  5.  You are rare.  A treasure.  A map.  What are you, and where have you been?

Prompt: It’s About the Details

The prompt this week comes from Agatha Christie, Dumb Witness, a continuation of studying the setting of a scene, and the details you choose to set up the characters and the scene in general.

We were directed to the coffee room, a room of fine proportions, a room of tightly shut windows and an odor of stale food. We had some excellent mutton, large slabs of water cabbage, and some dispirited potatoes. Some rather tasteless stewed fruit and custard followed. After Gorgonzola and biscuits the waiter brought us some doubtful fluid called coffee.

Write a paragraph using the details that defines the scene or a character.

Prompt: Write a Story Twice

The prompt this week is about writing for the audience, keeping their experience in mind when sharing your experience in words.

When writing to relate an experience, how do you tell the story? If it happened “this way,” do you have to write it that way or can you be creative with the storytelling process. How do you modify it, how do you adapt the story from reality to storytelling? Does it need to have the ring of truth or be the truth?

It depends. It depends upon your goals as a writer and your audience. What does your audience need to know to make your point? Are you making a point? Are you going for a joke? Are you testifying before the court? Are you teaching them something? What elements do you keep, which do you omit, which do you emphasize, which do you unemphasize?

Everything we do is colored by our experience, then adjusted for our audience. The choices in words, phrasing, and storytelling technique dictates what influences as you tell the story.

In the 1970s, Fuji Film took on its rival Kodak to create a new range of print and slide film. They researched customer’s experiences with film and film processing and found that the main complaint people had when picking up their film after processing was that the colors weren’t as intense. “You should have been there, it was so colorful.” The researchers found that memory intensified over time. Comparing a photograph of a sunset, it would look the same, but in the one to three weeks from taking the picture to having it developed and in their hands, human memory intensified the colors. Fuji amped up the colors in their film to make it match the human memory.

Writers need to do much the same. Intensify the scene and characters to enhance the moment. As author William Faulkner said, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

A story too bare may not hold the attention of the reader, but watch out for diluting the story with too many tangents and extraneous details.

From The Riverside Reader by Joseph Trimmer and Maxine Hairston came more information to help with our prompt. In summary, it stated that writers of narrative essays must be concerned about how much they tell their readers. Because an essay is based upon experience, few readers will know the entire backstory by that point in the story, nor should they. Do they need to? How much should they know and when they should know it is a constant struggle for fiction writers.

The ability to identify major and minor details in the writing as critical to the storytelling differentiates from the real life experience. When we experience an event, we have a knack for confusing dates, names, and the sequences of events, and we have the unalterable belief that simply “just because something happened to me, you are going to be fascinated.” This doesn’t always hold true when writing the event. We must pick and choose what we include as well as what we remove. We might play with the chronology of the event, restrict the backstory, change the characters or blend them together, even change the scene to make the reader’s experience a more enjoyable one as well as increase the tension and drama of the story.

According to Writers in the Grove member, Diana Lubarsky, “What is truth? Sometimes you got to make it up.”

The Prompt: Write a Story Twice

The prompt was to write a story twice. Have a different audience in mind for each telling.

Write a “true” story,” something that happened to you. Write it for two different audiences such as a child, grandchild, prissy mother, controlling mother-in-law, students in a class, a newspaper reporter – you choose.

Compare the two. Does the tone of voice change? Do the words change? How?

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?

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?