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.
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 1982 film "The Sword and the Sorcerer" (Half a Star).
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 or (poetry): 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:
- An Ideakit *
- A Lot of Blades
- On a Quadruple Bill
- Medieval Swashbucklers
- Bizarre Panoply
- Out in the Rain
- Little Turns of Speech and Identity**
*Yes, Ideakit as one word. As in, an 'idea' that can be put together from a set of predetermined parts, like a model or paint-by-numbers but with an 'idea'
** In the review it's identities, but I thought this was a good title so, hence the very small tweak, use the original if you prefer.
Erasure Selection:
This movie sure looks great, but I'm not sure I could pass a quiz on what it's about. Maybe it doesn't matter. "The Sword and the Sorcerer" is basically an Identikit movie, in which they start out with a lot of different faces and end up with the usual suspects. We may not be sure precisely what the power relationships are in the movie, but we know there's a young hero and an old king, an ancient villain and a maiden in peril.
There are also a lot of blades in this movie, Also dungeons, passageways, cold roast legs of beef, eyes that glow like embers and a three-pronged sword that holds the key to the kingdom. The movie drips with atmosphere, and I guess atmosphere is what Sword & Sorcery movies are about. They sure aren't about character.
Let's see. So far in the last year, I've seen "Dragonslayer," "Excalibur," and a preview of "Conan the Barbarian." Put them on a quadruple bill with "The Sword and the Sorcerer," and you'd sometimes have trouble figuring out when one ended and the next began.
That's not to say they're necessarily bad; I sort of enjoy medieval swashbucklers. It's just that there are only so many variations you can play on muscles and broadswords, lusty heroes and busty heroines, bearded kings, bizarre panoply, and that old standby, the storming of the citadel.
To give credit where it's due, "The Sword and the Sorcerer" does have two areas of relative originality: Its sword, and its sorcerer. I already mentioned that the sword is three-pronged. That's not all. It has the ability to hurl two of its blades like a spear-gun, and it has a dagger hidden in its handle (it must have been designed by James Bond's munitions man).
The sorcerer is a triumph of makeup, a Incredibly evil old man with a voice from the bottom of a well and a face that looks like somebody left the hot tar out in the rain. I also enjoyed Kathleen Beller's presence as the heroine; she behaves more intelligently than the usual actress asked to pant and heave through these movies, and her character has a neat weapon previously not much used in S&S epics, a knee to the groin.
But when the movie was over, I really wasn't much moved. "The Sword and the Sorcerer" is so dominated by its special effects, its settings and locations, that it doesn't care much about character. It trots its people onscreen, gives them names and labels, and puts them through their paces.
That's not enough. If a filmmaker would just take the time to provide human quirks and foibles for his S&S characters, to give them nice little turns of speech and Identities that we could tell apart and care about, this kind of movie could really be fun. Actually, one filmmaker has done exactly that, only his swords and sorcerers were set in the future: George Lucas, with the "Star Wars" movies.
