The 2022 Writing Series is a series of daily writing exercises for both prose writers and poets to spark their creative mind and to spur production of new pieces. 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 about" 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—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 series' exercises in under 30 minutes.
The Timer Method
If you're going with the timer method (which is certainly not required) I recommend setting four timers (these markers are if you're doing a 30 minute session): The First Timer for 5 minutes for a pre-writing reminder, if you do any planning or thinking on how those things can fit together or how to structure what you're doing, or to revisit your writer's notebook to remind yourself of anything you might have noted to write about 'in the future'. But mostly, to remind you not to overthink, not to delay the actual writing process. You should think at least a little about what the point of the piece will be (more in the third timer section) The Second Timer for 15 minutes which is the main writing time. Remember, don't overthink during this section. You're knocking out the piece. When this timer goes off it's not the end, but a signal that you'll be trying to wrap it up soon. The Third Timer for 5 minutes which is time to wrap up what you're writing. This is where you're making sure that you're tucking in any 'loose narrative threads' and getting to your conclusions. Remember, pieces should have some takeaway or 'point'. Some 'why'—a thing that the reader can point to if they're asking themselves "why did I read this?". The Fourth Timer for 5 minutes which is time for editing, for going back over the piece and giving it a 'once over' for typos. I highly suggest reading it aloud once at the beginning of the five minutes (or prior to starting the last timer). Then you'll use the time to fix things early on that you later changed, and to sprinkle in 'crumbs' which foreshadow or work well with later metaphors so that the piece feels more united.
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 1985 Disney film "The Black Cauldron" (Three and a Half Stars).
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:
- Stories of Doom and Obsession
- Fearsome Possibilities
- A Bottomless Source of Evil
- The Psychic Pig
- That Makes Her Invaluable
- Sky-Splitting
- An Allegedly Mature Adult
- A Shock of Nostalgia
Erasure Selection:
The best of the Disney animated features were not innocent children's entertainments, but blood-curdling stories of doom and obsession (with a few smiles along the way, of course). They only looked innocent because they were cartoons. Reflect for a moment on the Island of Lost Boys in "Pinocchio," or what happened to Bambi's mother. The great Disney cartoons contained all of the fearsome possibilities of the Grimm fairy tales - or, for that matter, of life itself. Only in recent years have the Disney feature cartoons grown pale and innocuous, as part of the general delusion that harmless means colorless.
Now comes a new Disney animated film in the old tradition. "The Black Cauldron" is a rip-roaring tale of swords and sorcery, evil and revenge, magic and pluck and luck. It tells the story of a search for a magic cauldron that can, if it falls into the hands of the evil Horned King, be used as a bottomless source of evil. And it takes us on a journey through a kingdom of some of the more memorable characters in any recent Disney film.
There is, for example, Hen Wen, the psychic pig. She can look into a pot of water and picture there the current location of the black cauldron. That makes her invaluable to the Horned King - and also to Taran, the young man who dreams of someday becoming a great warrior.
"The Black Cauldron" is a quest movie, telling the story of Taran's progress toward manhood, his journey through the kingdom, and his race against the Horned King for possession of the cauldron.
All of this could, of course, look very silly. Stories like this have to be told with complete conviction or they lose their passion. What surprised me, as I sat through "The Black Cauldron," was how quickly the story did absorb me. Instead of thinking deep thoughts about the past and future of Disney animation, I was caught up in the movie, amused by some of the characters, and sort of excited by the sky-splitting conclusion.
The story was so involving, indeed, that at one moment an allegedly mature adult in the audience leaned over to me and whispered, "But, Rog . . . if the pig is really psychic, how come they can't just find out where the cauldron is, and get there before the king?" A good point, but a better point is this one: How long has it been since anyone took a Disney cartoon that seriously?
The key to the movie is in the richness of the characterizations, and the two best characters, I think, are the Horned King (with voice by John Hurt), and a fuzzy little creature named Gurgi (voice by John Byner). Gurgi is a slavishly devoted little yes-man who gurgles with appreciation for everything done by anyone within earshot who is stronger than he is.
The main character, the young knight Taran, is not one of the stronger characters in the movie, but maybe that's to be expected. His thankless task is to be brave and noble, and those are not fascinating aspects of character - particularly not when contrasted to all the other weird characters in the movie.
The story is based on material I'm not familiar with, The Chronicles of Prydain series, by Lloyd Alexander. But some of the visuals look familiar, particularly Taran's magic sword, which seem borrowed from the laser swords in "Star Wars," and the final apocalyptic conclusion, where the special effects fireworks look like the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark". The movie uses this borrowed material with such energy, however, that it earns its right to it. By the end of "The Black Cauldron" I was remembering, with something of a shock of nostalgia, the strength and utter storytelling conviction of the early Disney animators. "The Black Cauldron" is a return to the tradition.
