The 2021 Writing Series is a series of daily writing exercises for both prose writers and poets to keep their 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.
This is not a standard writing session. This is pure production—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 it, you will be able to complete all of the exercises in under 30 minutes.
Erasing Roger Ebert 21 "Ben"
For today's exercise we have split paths for fiction and poetry, though I highly recommend that even fiction writers try the poetry exercise, because erasures can be a blast!
Poetry: For poetry do an erasure or black-out poem from the following: Roger Ebert's review of the 1972 film "Ben" (1 and a half stars) This is the sequel to the original "Willard".
Roger Ebert has been the archetypal 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.
Fiction: If you insist on fiction (or just feel like writing a "Title Mania" piece), write a piece with one of these titles taken from this section:
- Last Summer's Big Rat Movie
- Not Bad for a Rat
- Sounds Like Rubber
- A Few Billion Rats
- The Wrong Half of Each
- Tangible Evidence
Erasure Selection:
I wonder how Ben learned English. I seem to recall from "Willard," last summer's big rat movie, that Willard trained Ben to heel, beg, roll over, play dead and sic Ernest Borgnine. Not bad for a rat. But when did Ben learn English? It takes Berlitz six weeks of intensive training to get a French businessman to the point where he can proposition a girl on Rush St. -- and here's Ben learning instinctively.
Ben also talks in his new movie. It's hard to understand what he says, however, because all he does is squeak in various octaves. He sounds like Rubber Ducky being goosed. The movie's hero is Danny, an 8-year-old with a heart condition. Danny loves Ben. Danny apparently understands Rubber Ducky talk, too, maybe because he's a graduate of 'Sesame Street.' Do you ever get the feeling that when the Earth is finally conquered, it won't be by rats but by tiny, beady-eyed, preschool super-intelligences, who attack us with atomic alphabets?
Ben and his friends head for the sewers and plan their assault on mankind. This involves being thrown through the air by invisible animal trainers so that they land on-camera and scare hell out of sewer workers. Everyone knows this is nonsense. If Art Carney could go down in the sewers day after day and fearlessly face alligators, what's a few billion rats?
Doesn't matter, though. This isn't a thriller but a geek movie. In a thriller, we're supposed to be scared by some awesome menace to mankind -- the Green Blob maybe, or Big Foot, or the Invincible Squid and his implacable enemy, red wine sauce. But in a geek movie, the whole idea is to be disgusted because the actors have rats all over them.
You know what a geek is, or at least you do if you grew up near a county fairgrounds like I did. He's the guy who bites the head off a living chicken. I used to hate the geek show, but I sat through it manfully because that was a test of your courage. If you passed it, you got to pay the extra quarter and see the lady who was tattooed all over. Also the Half-Man, Half-Woman, who, to my intense disappointment, turned out to be the wrong half of each.
The neatest thing about "Ben" is the relationship between the police captain and the newspaper reporter. In recent years, these two groups have been somewhat antagonistic to each other on the screen. But in the good old days of Spencer Tracy and Pat O'Brien, they used to pal around and hang out in the same after-ours joints.
Now the clock has been turned back. It seems that Willard left a diary behind, explaining how he trained the rats. The reporter doesn't believe a rat can be trained. "All right, read this," the cop says, handing over his only piece of tangible evidence. Given the level of intelligence in this movie, the reporter probably took it home, filled up his tub, and read it out loud to Rubber Ducky. Maybe that's how Ben learned English.
