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French Surrealists found inspiration in games and play, creating the unexpected and often wonderful. These writing exercises are drawn from their practices.
Solo exercises:Automatic writing, writing done without thinking about it, is often a source of the weird and wonderful. Sit down with a pen and your notebook and start writing whatever comes to mind. The point of the exercise is to keep the pen moving and the words flowing. If you find yourself unable to do this without stopping, pick a word or letter that can be used to start each new sentence at stopping points. Obviously, what you derive from this exercise won't be anything like a finished story! But it will be writing that you can mine for ideas, expressions, and general inspiration. Cut-ups can be done by taking a page of text and using scissors to cut it up into individual words and phrases. Re-arrange them to create new and interesting word patterns that might be titles or first/last lines. Directions can be written in the style of appliance directions for things that don't usually require directions. For example, "How to Operate the Human Heart" or "Maintaining Your Sorrow." Simulation involves writing from an active mental state that is not your own. Imagine yourself in a mental state not your own - fear, anxiety, delirium (hopefully you're not in any of these states) -- and attempt to write as though you were experiencing it. Describe your room or an outing from that point of view. Exercises for Multiple People: Try these with your writing group! Definitions can be generated with two or more players. One player writes a question, such as "What is thought?" or "What is a spaceship?" and folds the paper so their question is not visible. They pass it to hte next person, who writes down the answer with looking at the question. The exquisite corpse exercise requires at least three or four people. Write an article and an adjective on the top of a piece of paper, such as "the blue" or "a lovely", and fold the paper so they can't be seen. Pass the paper to the left. Now write a noun on your paper, fold it again so it isn't visible, and pass it again. Continue this with a verb, then another article/adverb pairing, then a noun. Unfold the papers and read them aloud. These sentences can be mined for story ideas or phrases. You can make the sentences more complicated if desired. The game gets its name from the first sentence the Surrealists generated in this way: "The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine." Objects is best when done with a number of people. One player leaves the room and chooses an object, idea, person, location, or other entity. While she's gone, the other players also choose an object. When the first player returns, she's told the object that has been chosen and must describe their own object in terms of the chosen object's properties until the other players are able to guess the object. Parallel stories, best played with three of more players, involves each person chosing a word that must be integrated into a brief story. If you don't want to leave the word choice to the players, find another random way to generate them, such as pulling them from the dictionary or having someone else generate them beforehand.
The copyright of the article Absurd Inspiration in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Fiction is owned by Cat Rambo. Permission to republish Absurd Inspiration in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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