Exits Rapidly followed by Father
April 17th 2010 04:22
Had a day off work on Thursday after the minor surgery on my eyelid. Spent the time resting up occasionally, and fiddling around not doing anything terribly inspiring the rest of the time - except for a little more work on the script for the children's musical that I'm working on with a friend. The brain insisted on being active even if the body was trying to get itself back together again.
One of the things about a computer when it's been around your house for a while is that all sorts of accumulated junk gets left inside it. For instance,
while desktop googling the phrase exit signs I came across a file named 'novel in a year exercises'. It doesn't actually have the phrase 'exit signs' in it, but it does have both words close to each other, so obviously Google Desktop thought that was near enough.
The first exercise, which I'll reprint below, is based on the opening phrase: 'The day after my eighth birthday, my father told me...' (as you'll see). I waffle on about this for a while, as one does in these sorts of exercises. Though they are good for getting you started when creativity doesn't seem to be just sitting there ready to go. For instance, with the third scene of the script I mentioned above, I got really stuck. I'd written a draft, and it stunk. Both my collaborator and I agreed it stunk. In fact we said worse things about it than that. But stinky first drafts aren't a problem once you get over the shock of having written something so bad. What they do is get some gunk out of the way (rather like the gunk that was in my eyelid!) and allow you to think more deeply into what you're trying to write.
The other three exercises (only three as I'd obviously not found this approach very inspiring, since it's unrelated to any particular work you might be doing) discuss why I wanted to write a novel (that goes for all of three lines), the remembrance of an accident I had as a schoolboy, and then a discussion of the time my wife and I got lost in Seoul, Korea. This last appeared in a modified form on the Travel blog, so these exercises may have been done just after we returned from the UK in 2007.
Anyway, for the record, here's the first exercise, as promised:
‘The day after my eighth birthday, my father told me’ is supposed to be the opening, but there’s a problem: on my eighth birthday I had no idea who my father was, nor if he existed. In fact I never thought about him at all, as I guess boys normally would do. A father was a non-event in my family situation: I had a grandfather I lived with (and a grandmother) and two uncles. Why did I need a father?
So to say that my father told me anything the day after my eighth birthday would have to be a lie, or a figment of my imagination. Some boys who didn’t have fathers might have thought of things that their father would say to them the day after they turned eight, if they had the imaginations. Things like, I’m going to take you to McDonald’s. Not that I’d be dead keen on a father who said that, never having been particularly enamoured of McDonald’s. Or this fictional father might have said, I’m going to give you the beating of your life and if you tell your mother, you’re dead.
I think, in that instance, I’d prefer the McDonald’s father. Though perhaps, with the other father, it could be the beginning of a great adventure. Perhaps he was only inciting me in that way in order to see if I was truly a boy of eight who wasn’t going to be put in a corner just because his father threatened him. And then it would be off out the door, lickety-split, and he’d be trying to catch me, and I’d race down towards the river, along the bank, over the bridge and into the woods, where I’d hide, breathing heavily, hearing his footsteps and his fierce voice telling me that he was going to catch me any minute and beat the life out of me.
Or perhaps it could be a father who said, ‘I’m going to pay for you to have piano lessons,’ and then the great monster of an instrument that stood in the corner of the dark lounge would suddenly become my friend instead of a scary, large thing that was ready to leap out at me in the dark when I passed it to go to bed.
Sounds good enough for the start of a story itself....almost.
One of the things about a computer when it's been around your house for a while is that all sorts of accumulated junk gets left inside it. For instance,
The first exercise, which I'll reprint below, is based on the opening phrase: 'The day after my eighth birthday, my father told me...' (as you'll see). I waffle on about this for a while, as one does in these sorts of exercises. Though they are good for getting you started when creativity doesn't seem to be just sitting there ready to go. For instance, with the third scene of the script I mentioned above, I got really stuck. I'd written a draft, and it stunk. Both my collaborator and I agreed it stunk. In fact we said worse things about it than that. But stinky first drafts aren't a problem once you get over the shock of having written something so bad. What they do is get some gunk out of the way (rather like the gunk that was in my eyelid!) and allow you to think more deeply into what you're trying to write.
The other three exercises (only three as I'd obviously not found this approach very inspiring, since it's unrelated to any particular work you might be doing) discuss why I wanted to write a novel (that goes for all of three lines), the remembrance of an accident I had as a schoolboy, and then a discussion of the time my wife and I got lost in Seoul, Korea. This last appeared in a modified form on the Travel blog, so these exercises may have been done just after we returned from the UK in 2007.
Anyway, for the record, here's the first exercise, as promised:
‘The day after my eighth birthday, my father told me’ is supposed to be the opening, but there’s a problem: on my eighth birthday I had no idea who my father was, nor if he existed. In fact I never thought about him at all, as I guess boys normally would do. A father was a non-event in my family situation: I had a grandfather I lived with (and a grandmother) and two uncles. Why did I need a father?
So to say that my father told me anything the day after my eighth birthday would have to be a lie, or a figment of my imagination. Some boys who didn’t have fathers might have thought of things that their father would say to them the day after they turned eight, if they had the imaginations. Things like, I’m going to take you to McDonald’s. Not that I’d be dead keen on a father who said that, never having been particularly enamoured of McDonald’s. Or this fictional father might have said, I’m going to give you the beating of your life and if you tell your mother, you’re dead.
I think, in that instance, I’d prefer the McDonald’s father. Though perhaps, with the other father, it could be the beginning of a great adventure. Perhaps he was only inciting me in that way in order to see if I was truly a boy of eight who wasn’t going to be put in a corner just because his father threatened him. And then it would be off out the door, lickety-split, and he’d be trying to catch me, and I’d race down towards the river, along the bank, over the bridge and into the woods, where I’d hide, breathing heavily, hearing his footsteps and his fierce voice telling me that he was going to catch me any minute and beat the life out of me.
Or perhaps it could be a father who said, ‘I’m going to pay for you to have piano lessons,’ and then the great monster of an instrument that stood in the corner of the dark lounge would suddenly become my friend instead of a scary, large thing that was ready to leap out at me in the dark when I passed it to go to bed.
Sounds good enough for the start of a story itself....almost.
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