The Notebooking Daily 2020 Writing Series is a daily writing exercises for both prose writers and poets to keep your creative mind stretched and ready to go—fresh for your other writing endeavors. The writing prompts take the impetus—that initial crystal of creation—out of your hands (for the most part) and changes your writing creation into creative problem solving. Instead of being preoccupied with the question "What do I write" you are instead pondering "How do I make this work?" And in the process you are producing new writing.
These exercises are not meant to be a standard writing session. They are meant to be productive and to keep your brain thinking about using language to solve simple or complex problems. The worst thing you can do is sit there inactive. It's like taking a 5 minute breather in the middle of a spin class—the point is to push, to produce something, however imperfect. If you don't overthink them, you will be able to complete all of the exercises in under 30 minutes.
Erasing Roger Ebert 6 "Blame it on Rio"
For poetry do an erasure or black-out poem from the following: Roger Ebert's review of the 1988 film "Blame it on Rio" (1 Star) starring Michael Caine.
Roger Ebert has been the stereotypical film critic for decades, and he's written thousands of reviews. Because of their nature, almost their own bit of ekphrastic art, this series of erasures will be lots of fun!
An Erasure/Blackout is really simple: you take the given text and remove many words to make it your own new piece. One way to go about the erasure that I like to do is to copy the text and paste it twice into your document before you start erasing or blacking out (in MS Word set the text background color to black), that way if you get further into the erasure and decide you want a somewhat different tone or direction, it's easy to go to the unaltered version and make the erasure/black-out piece smoother. Another tip is to look for recurring words, in this example 'bingo' occurs multiple times and could be a good touchstone for your piece.
If you insist on fiction (or just feel like writing a "Title Mania" piece), write a piece with one of these six titles taken from this section:
- A Cynical Sitcom
- Old Enough to Take Care of Herself
- A 1940s Bongo Comedy
- More Appropriate to a Brazen Hussy
- Quite Frankly, Yes
- The Prurient Interests of Dirty Old Men of All Ages
Erasure Selection:
Roger Ebert's review of "Blame it on Rio"
As a general rule, I think it's wrong for a married man of forty-seven years to have an affair with his best friend's seventeen year-old daughter. Don't you? And especially if the girl has emotional problems. I can imagine a movie being made about the situation, and indeed the right movie might even be sensitive and poignant.
But to make a cynical sitcom out of it is questionable. That's what they've done with "Blame It On Rio." This movie is clearly intended to appeal to the prurient interests of dirty old men of all ages. It starts with the basic idea of "10" (an unhappy man flees to a beach and discovers an agreeable nymphet of startling sexuality). But in "10" Bo Derek was old enough to take care of herself, God knows, and her affair with Dudley Moore was handled with at least some wit and sophistication.
"Blame It On Rio," however, has the mind of a 1940s bongo comedy and the heart of a porno film. It's really unsettling to see how casually this movie takes a serious situation. A disturbed girl is using sex to play mind games with a middle-aged man, and the movie get its yuks with slapstick scenes where one guy goes out the window when the other guy comes in the door. What's shocking is how many first-rate talents are associated with this sleaze. The director is Stanley Donen, of "Singin' in the Rain." The man having the affair is Michael Caine, one of my favorite actors. His friend (the father of the girl) is Joseph Bologna. The girl is played by a zaftig model named Michelle Johnson, who is set up as the new Bo Derek.
The plot is the usual silliness: Two families are planning a vacation in Rio, but then Caine has a disagreement with his wife, who decides to go to Club Med instead. What finally happens is that the two fathers and their teenage daughters go to Rio, where Johnson shamelessly seduces Caine with techniques that seem more appropriate to a brazen hussy than to a seventeen year-old kid. The rest of the movie alternates uneasily between the girl's neurotic attempts to manipulate Caine with sex, Caine's real qualms, and wildly inappropriate screwball scenes. Sample: Caine thinks Bologna has found out the secret. He has to listen as Bologna reads from his daughter's diary. The daughter mentions her new lover's great teeth. Caine tries to hide his teeth with his lips while he talks. Funny, sure, but not in a movie where the underlying subject is so potentially serious.
Does the movie have redeeming qualities? Quite frankly, yes, it does, but not the kind it makes you proud to enjoy. Johnson could indeed be the next Bo Derek: She has a winning way, a cheerful personality, and a body that the camera never tires of exploring. Caine does as well with the material as we could possibly hope; in the hands of a lesser actor, we wouldn't be uneasy over the material, we'd be appalled. A lot of skill has gone into the awkward subject matter of this movie, and it's thought-provoking that "Blame It On Rio" sometimes almost works.
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If you'd like some background music to write to, try Shakuhachi [The Japanese Flute] - Kohachiro Miyata.
