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 1984 film "Children of the Corn" (One 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:
- Behind the Rows of Corn
- A Foot Beneath the Surface
- One Fateful Sunday
- Maybe They Deserved to Die
- The Strange Doings of the Cornfield Cult
- Evil Interlopers
- The Ringleaders Speak
Erasure Selection:
“Children of the Corn” is a movie about a thing that lives behind the rows of corn. I am not sure if the thing is a god, a spirit, or John Deere crossed with a mole. All I know is that you can see it coming. It plows along about a foot underneath the surface, racing angrily up and down the cornfields.
When I first saw this thing, whatever it is, I knew it was time to abandon all hope for “Children of the Corn.” If there's anything worse than a movie about a small town filled with evil children who are the victims of mass hysteria and think there's something that “lives behind the rows,” it's a movie about a small town filled with evil children who are right – there is something behind the rows.
The thing has great influence over the children. One fateful Sunday, it made all the kids in town suddenly turn on the adults and slit their throats. Since then, the kids have been running the town on behalf of the thing behind the corn rows.
(If the thought even fleetingly crosses your mind that somebody should have reported all the missing adults, you're in the wrong movie. This was apparently a town where none of the adults made or received long-distance calls, used charge cards, had out-of-town relatives, or knew anybody who would miss them. Maybe they deserved to die.)
Anyway, one day a young couple comes driving down the road on the way to the guy's new teaching job. They run down a zombie who has lurched out of a cornfield. They put the dead body in the trunk of their car and drive into town for help. There they get involved in the strange doings of the cornfield cult.
The kids in the town are led by a shrill-voiced little girl and by a mean little boy (who looks like a miniature adult and talks like he has helium in his mouth). The ringleaders speak in pseudo-biblical English, kind of a King James version of Stephen King, all about the evil interlopers and about how he who lives behind the corn must be appeased. There's a grisly symbolic crucifixion, a nighttime ceremony out in the fields, and then that weird creature plowing around under the ground.
At the end, those of us who are left in the theater cling to one faint hope: That our patience will be rewarded by an explanation, no matter how bizarre, of the thing that moves behind the rows. No luck. Instead, the movie generates into a routine action sequence involving lots of flames and screams and hairbreadth escapes.
By the end of “Children of the Corn,” the only thing moving behind the rows is the audience, fleeing to the exits.
