Writing Exercises I have loved: Part 3 - by Ruth Hatfield

 Sometimes, the best writing exercises are the short ones! I often find that a major stumbling-block to sitting down to write anything is just the thought of what a huge task it is – even the shortest poems or stories are often huge in conception, and the task of boiling them down to a few words requires a great deal of scribbling and thinking (and starting and stopping and starting again). As for novels – it often makes my head ache just to think about how much my head aches when it’s holding the enormous monster that wants to become a whole book. So as with last month’s exercise, this one is aimed at making you see how a small amount of writing can get you very far in terms of satisfying the creative urge. What you do with the results is your own business!

I can’t remember where this exercise comes from, although it is certainly one I found in one of the many books on creative writing I’ve read over the years, so it belongs entirely to someone else (if anyone reading this knows who that is, please tell me and I’ll credit them). I love it, though, and it’s a joy to do when you feel that time is short.

Get a picture you like – from a book, the newspaper, a magazine, the internet, anywhere. Look at it for 2 minutes. Now finish these sentences:

I heard

I heard

I heard

I saw

I saw

I touched

I touched

I wondered

What you end up with is something like a cross between a poem and a sketch. Of course repeating the same beginnings to the sentences means you have to look at various elements of the picture rather than the first thing that springs to mind, and it’s a classic way of ensuring you use most of your senses (perhaps you could add ‘I smelled…’ and ‘I tasted…’, although that would definitely render the results a little more prosaic!). But what I like best about this exercise is the odd, slightly jarring nature of what you end up with. If you read your finished sentences out loud to yourself a few times (having hidden the original picture away first), the words become like threads of spider-silk, drifting off into a space you want to look further into. It’s a lovely way of hinting at something very large with just a few words.

Again, if you wrote (or know who wrote) that exercise, please let me know and I’ll give you/them full credit for it! It’s given me many moments of strange magic.