Writing Exercise – Class Three

Writing Exercise – Class Three


• Picture a local landmark. You are a man proposing to his partner at this landmark. For five minutes describe this landmark through the eyes of love.
• For the last five minutes, picture the same landmark through the eyes of a man who had lost his son to the war.

* note: I didn’t do any of that. I had a long hard day at work and decided to write the start of my novel. It’s still loose and a concept, but check it out.


I looked around at the people and buildings far below. The world’s tallest free-standing structure, or at least it was. A tower with a peak.

“Trust you to put us in a giant penis,” Terry quipped. She hunched up her belt and sizeable jeans, looking me squarely in the eyes. “What exactly are we doing here again?”

“Gruff and to the point, I see. Shattering the lesbian stereotypes yet again…”

My response is met with a cold, dead glare. My acerbic wit is wasted on Terry.

“We’re here for charity, as you know,” I said, as if talking to a five year old child. A five year old lesbian child. In leather chaps.

“The Gay Wedding Show’s finale episode is here tonight! This is where the couple will come, walk towards each other, get married and everyone will clap and cheer. And then I’ll go home depressed and eat a tub of ice cream. This is our assignment for the Archives, anyway, to get the scoop. There has to be some benefit to being an event’s sponsor. Where is that waiter??”

Terry rolled her eyes and continued peering over the edge.

“It will all be over soon.”

How prophetic those words were to be!


Notes

- When writing you need a goal and to keep that goal in mind to push you to continue.

- Every story has already been written. It’s either:

1. A personal journey where the person changes at the end

2. Stranger comes to town

- It can help when you’re writing to think “Someone out there is going to love this. Someone needs this.”

- Write about the reader, not about the writer.

- Include things people can relate to in your story. For example, in class we had art tables covered in brown paper and were asked not to write or draw on the tables. I would let my mind wander and make one small mark, and be like “Oh, damn! They said not to draw! Crap!” My mind would wander and I’d force it back, thinking “Don’t write! Don’t colour!” When I left, the table was full, like a mural.


This class’ newspaper story:

Two mummified babies found in an abandoned trunk in the basement of a Los Angeles apartment building this past summer have been linked through DNA to a Scottish-born nurse who lived in the building and spent the last years of her life in the Vancouver area.

Investigators tracked down relatives of Janet M. Barrie in the Vancouver area and DNA samples collected from a niece helped determine the babies were Barrie's.

"The DNA was a match for familial ties. So, we're sure that both babies belonged to Ms. Barrie," said Los Angeles police Capt. Fabian Lizarraga in an email.

But how Barrie's babies -- each wrapped in 1930s newspapers -- died and why they ended up in a trunk remain a mystery in a case that has made headlines around the world.

Authorities conceded Monday they probably will never know the answers.

Ed Winter, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Coroner, said there were no obvious signs of trauma to either baby and toxicology tests could not determine causes of death.

"It's a big gap. You kind of wonder why," he said by phone.

Investigators have not been able to locate any relatives who have knowledge of the babies or even that Barrie was ever pregnant.

"Our investigation has run its course for now," Lizarraga said. "We probably will have no further developments for now, and for awhile."

Investigators initially described the infants as a female baby carried to full term and a fetus of unknown gender. A team of two pathologists and one forensic anthropologist have since determined that the fetus was also female, Winter said.

Their bodies were discovered Aug. 17 inside an abandoned steamer trunk while the basement of an apartment building was being cleaned out.

One was wrapped in a newspaper from 1933; the other from 1935. They were each stowed in leather doctor's satchels.

Clues inside the trunk -- including handwritten letters, Christmas cards and photographs -- led investigators to believe the trunk belonged to Barrie, who was also called "Jean."

Barrie moved to Vancouver in 1985 to live with her sister, Isobel Holmes, and died seven years later. The sister has also since died.

Winter declined to speculate Monday what may have happened to the babies.

Barrie was born in 1897 and immigrated to Canada with her family in 1910. In 1925, she moved to Los Angeles.


- Suspense could be created around what happened

- The baby was found in a doctor’s satchel and the woman was a nurse. Could the doctor have delivered and killed them?

- You can create suspense in other ways, with things like having the reader know there’s an intruder in the house but the woman inside doesn’t know.

- This story above could start with finding the babies in the trunk and then go back in time to reveal the people involved and how the babies got there.

- Why would someone store their dead babies in with old Christmas cards???


Homework:
Write a few pages in which you reconstruct the world immediately outside your childhood home. Bring its objects to vivid life for the reader who hasn’t been there. Explore what different aspects of this world meant to you then or mean to you now.


I can only remember summer.

I’m sure we lived there for other seasons, but I can only remember the summer. We lived in a rented house in Scarborough, the top two floors, a man rented the basement. He had his own entrance and I don’t remember seeing him often. My mother was recently divorced and single and her distrust of men in general was a presence in the house so I don’t remember anything about him other than fear. I was always taught to fear men. Although a little part of me registers him as attractive, but I was only about six at the time.

Across from us was a house with a big year and a huge apple, or I think crab apple, tree. There was a little girl who lived there that I went to school with and I can remember playing in that yard of hers for hours, always coming home when the street lights came on.

In the spring especially the tree would bloom with these fragrant pink and white petals that you could smell all down the block. We would pick them, or likely as we were so small, pick them off the ground and put them in buckets to make perfume. I’m sure all the little boys in the neighbourhood were making perfume at that time.

I don’t remember ever actually getting any perfume. Did we squeeze the petals with something? Did we leave them in a big bucket over night and hope for the best? I don’t remember now.

I remember my babysitter lived just around the corner and that she had a poodle and a swimming pool that we were rarely allowed to use.

I remember riding my first bike in the driveway of this house. My uncle came to teach me and I was a wimp, always begging not to let go and being scared of falling over and hurting myself. I remember wanting training wheels. But I never had training wheels, and I never fell off and hurt myself so something must have worked out right.

I remember one day my mom came home eating hot cashews out of a paper bag and we sat down on the front step and she told me that we had to move, that the landlord was kicking us out, he wanted the house back.

Writing Class - Number Two

Writing Exercise – Class Two


• Choose characters that are opposites

• Force tension. Make the characters have an argument and then be somewhere they can’t talk.

• Show a twist, people have secrets.

• Reveal by concealing (subtext)

• If you say the character talks slowly, you don’t… then… need… to… put… marks… after… every… word. It will annoy the reader.

• Dialogue should be used only for conflict.

• Read out your dialogue to make sure it sounds right.

• Different generations speak differently, for example an old lady might call someone “Miss”.

• Ray fights with his wife. His friends calls and asks what’s up. Ray clenches his teeth and says “Nothing.” The reader knows the truth, they have the inside track and know more than even Ray’s best friend.



Write for 10 minutes starting with the line “That night after the piano recital you were so angry at me.”


That night after the piano recital you were so angry at me.

You rotate, turn, move like the hands of a clock. Happy time, sad time, angry time. All with little or no provocation. Drama.

Little things mean a lot. Why can’t you let go?

Once you arrived early for class. You had been told to wait on the third floor, in the comfortable chairs, but the sign on the elevator said to check with security.

“Excuse me,” you said. “I’m just checking in. I’m here for my writing class and was told to wait on the third floor.” All smiles.

“No.”

“Excuse me?” Clutches pearls.

“No, you’ll have to wait down here. The teacher will come get you.”

Shaken, dejected, spurned, wronged, you slink over to the corner. No, further in the corner than that. By the stairs, under the stairs, well, one foot resting in the area under the stairs. Just out of range of the janitor with the mop. Well, nearly out of range.

You pouted for 30 minutes until the teacher showed up. When he came, he said he could only get half the group at a time in the elevator. ‘Well, screw him!’ you thought. ‘I’ll be in the second group then. I’m not going to rush. I’ll show him!’ So petulant.

And as you waited for him to return for group two, thinking ‘I was here first! Why was I not in group one???’ you considered you might be over-reacting.

Possibly like that night at the piano recital?

Possibly like right now?



This week’s newspaper article, try to spot the characters:


Police say a woman involved in a five-vehicle crash in the northeast of the city fled the scene and tried to set herself on fire before she was taken to hospital with non life-threatening injuries.

A man is also in hospital in critical condition after the Wednesday evening crash, which closed down Bayview Ave. from Foxwarren Dr., just north of Sheppard, to Empress Ave, but police said his injuries are not life-threatening.

Police say the man, who is believed to be in his 50s, was hit in the head with a wooden two-by-four that left one of the vehicles and went through his windshield during the crash.

Staff Sgt. Frank Barredo said a woman left the crash scene and went one street south to a home on Foxwarren Dr.

“It appears she entered a house, turned on some gas elements, presumably to ignite them, but was later outside the house trying to set her hair on fire with a lighter,” said Barredo.

“She had injuries consistent with an auto collision,” he added.

The woman was not known to the residents of the home, located in a quiet, upscale neighbourhood, more than 1,000 metres from the crash scene.

“I just went out of the house to put out the garbage and she must have come in,” said an elderly female occupant who was shaken by the incident.

“As I was coming back around the corner, my neighbour yelled out to me ‘Doris, someone went in your house.’ I come in and sure enough, there’s a woman in the kitchen, leaning over the gas stove, with all the burners on trying to ignite herself.”

She said the woman appeared to be in her late twenties.

Hours after the incident, collision reconstruction units were on the scene trying to piece together events which left vehicles spread across the sidewalks on both sides of Bayview Ave.

Police said the man and woman who were sent to hospital were both drivers involved in the crash, which occurred at Bayview and Elmwood Aves. around 6 p.m.

The other three drivers were not seriously hurt, but several others involved in the accident suffered minor injuries.

Motorists are advised to avoid the area while police investigate.



One interpretation is the woman is trying to kill herself. But what if she was trying to make it look like she was more injured that she actually was in an attempt to shift the blame? What if the old woman in the house also had a secret?



Homework – write a page of dialogue


I stepped outside while he entered the alarm code and locked the door. There was always an easy camaraderie between us as we locked up after our shift and walked to his car.

I started a little ahead, he soon caught up. The night air was warm, end of summer but not yet fall.

A mother and son passed us on the sidewalk, going in the direction we had just came from.

“That boy looks like Macaulay Culkin.” He said.

“Back off! That one’s mine! I saw him first.”

“A little young, isn’t he?”

“Old enough to pee, old enough for me.”

We crossed the street to his car. He stopped for a second on the road and looked at me.

“That kind of thing will land you in prison getting raped every night.”

“Where’s the down side?”


Talk 2 Strangers

Breaking the Ice: Look to the moment for inspiration. Talk about the place or space you’re in.
Small Talk: Introvert or Extrovert? Cats vs. Dogs? Mountains or Beaches? Tobogganing vs. Walking?
Deeper Talk: What are you sure of? What makes you the person that you are? What is the Good Life?
The Graceful Exit: “It was nice talking to you…” shake the person’s hand, then bid yourself adieu.


“Hey, you’re a facilitator, it says so one your sash. Facilitate me please.”

“Sure, follow me.”

We walk through the crowds of people, he with confidence, never turning around to check if I’m there. We reach the top of the steps and he talks to a handsome young Indian man.

“Hi, my name is John. What’s your name?”

“Anand.”

“I’m Adam.”

“Great. If you could have any super power, what would it be?”

Lots of thinking among us. Anand speaks first.

“I would have the ability to teleport.”

“What would you do with that?”

“Well, I don’t know. I’d have the freedom to go places though…”

John pipes in excitedly, “I would have the ability to be on fire and throw fire and be fire man and do things with fire!”

“What about the summer? Wouldn’t you get hot?”

“No man, I’d be on fire.”

“I would have the ability to see through people’s clothes.”

General laughter.

“See, I think my idea is the best idea. Like you, you can’t think of anywhere you want to teleport to, and you I don’t think have anything in mind you want to burn, but I can think of actual people I want to see naked, RIGHT NOW!”

General laughter.

“But like everyone? Would you want to see everyone naked through their clothes?”

“Oooh, good point. It would have to be selective. I would have to be able to turn it on and off.”

Writing class # 1

• Have empathy for your characters, not sympathy
• If you’re having trouble writing from a perspective other than your own, give your characters problems you don’t have
• Create tension. Example: Betty lives to get married and can’t wait for it. Veronica hates marriage. Instant tension.
• Non-fiction today is “This is my problem” followed by 400 pages and then “This is how I solved it”
• Writing that someone’s eyes are darting around says something. It’s better than just saying someone was nervous.
• Pick an appropriate name, it can say a lot about your characters. For example, two lawyers: one named Franklin, the other named Jim-Bob.
• Know your character: what they had for breakfast, if they chew their nails, but don’t include it all.
• Let the reader form their own opinions. For example, “Sally was biting her way through her fourth nail of the morning” is better than “Sally was nervous”. It engages the reader, gives them something to do.
• Know the character’s goals – long term and short.
• To make your story relatable, include a situation that everyone’s been through. For example, have your character just miss their bus and have to wait a long time for the next one. People will be like “I’ve done that!”
• While reading other books, try to figure out what lured you in to books you like. Make notes about that and use it in your own work.
• When writing about yourself, make sure you come from an authentic place. Present yourself warts and all.

You can find inspiration for characters anywhere. For example, this newspaper article from yesterday’s Toronto Star.

A grieving Mississauga father fed up with the repeated vandalism of his dead son’s highway-side memorial hired a private investigator to keep watch over the site and identify who’s responsible.

On Sunday, the investigator caught a hooded man on film dismantling the site with a hammer. He reported the incident to OPP Monday.

But in a cruel twist, the act of tearing down the family’s painstakingly reassembled memorial may not be a matter police will act upon, since the site isn’t on the family’s own property.

“It’s bad enough that a person has to live with the grief,” said Tony Jasinski, whose son Thomas was killed in April 2009 when his Jeep Wrangler careened into the ditch, went airborne and slammed into the Glen Erin Dr. overpass that crosses Highway 403 in Mississauga.

“I’m struggling every day. And then to have something like this happen, it just knocks the wind out of you,” he said.

It was the 11th time since June the memorial has been damaged or entirely removed — sometimes just hours after his family rebuilt it.

Matthew Romanik, an ex-cop and president of Star Quality Investigations, filmed the unidentified man ripping down flowers and a cross from a wooden post identifying the overpass. He also removed a lantern, candles and a model angel, all of which had been erected just hours earlier by Thomas’s mother, Ursula.

“He was ripping all this stuff off and shoving it into a yellow, plastic shopping bag,” Romanik said.

The former Peel police sergeant then approached the man, who Romanik said wore dark glasses, and asked him what he was doing. Romanik said the man told him he didn’t approve of roadside memorials.

“I would say he was angry, definitely,” Romanik said.

After two previous incidents, notes — one signed “concerned citizen” — were left at the site explaining it had been destroyed because of the perpetrator’s dislike for roadside memorials. Strangely, a cross taken from another memorial near Ajax was also once left behind, Ursula said.

She said she also left notes at the site after she rebuilt it, urging whoever was wrecking the memorial to stop, or at least accept a smaller display. On Sept. 1, after it was tampered with again, she said someone had written on the note: “Stop while you’re ahead.”

Romanik’s video footage, along with a description of the hooded man’s black pickup truck and licence plate number, has been given to the OPP’s Port Credit division.

But it’s not clear whether they will pursue the lead, since police don’t take third-party complaints, said a police spokesperson. They only respond to those filed by the owners of the damaged property — in this case the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, which owns the highway.

Regardless of what police do, Jasinski says he will stop at nothing to prevent this vandalism from continuing.

“I don’t intend to have a shrine,” he says. “A little picture, a little tree growing right by the pole, that’s all I want.”

There are a lot of characters you could write as from this story. You could write as the parents, the detective, the deceased as a ghost, or the man taking the memorial down. With all the characters we understand their motivations, it’s clear why they’re doing what they’re doing, except for the man taking the memorial apart.

You could write from his perspective. What motivates him? Perhaps he knew the deceased and didn’t like him. Perhaps he had a close relative or spouse die in a car crash and seeing this every day near his house reminds him of it. Perhaps he killed someone in a car crash and is feeling the guilt. There are many different ways it could go.

1. Think about someone in your life you really care for.

2. Write a description of their hands.

3. Write about something they are doing with their hands.

4. Write a metaphor about a remote, far-away place. (Don’t get too hung up on definitions – write whatever you think a metaphor is).

5. Ask the person with the hands a question.

6. Write their response in a way that shows they weren’t really listening.

7. Write for 10 minutes.

Sarah’s hands are young but scarred. They look their 23 years but only at first glance. Look deeper and you will see more.

She twists her hands, one in the other, thinking, waiting. She wishes she weren’t here. Somewhere else. Like Hawaii.

“What are you thinking” I ask.

Sarah looks up, noticing me for the first time. She looks lost, confused.

“Sorry, what? Did you say something?”

She looks around. At me. Through me. I don’t exist.

“Nothing, never mind,” I say, and she’s already back to the hands, and the turning. Over and over. I’m not there.

How long can results take?, I wonder

I’ve seen them in the Dollarama downtown. First response, for when you need to be sure. But how can anyone be sure when your test kit costs one dollar? I suppose they may be good for teenagers, young kids on an allowance. Thirteen and fourteen year-old girls who can’t face the truth, can’t tell anyone and can’t afford a proper test. Getting all the piece of mind $1 can buy.

Sarah was there once. But this is different. She’s older now, happier. Part of a couple. We’re in a real doctor’s office now.

But there are times in life where you look at the woman and see the girl. She who she was before time marched on.

And sitting here now, I watch her waiting, and I see the youth at heart.