Nuts and Bolts Workshop

We held our first workshop yesterday morning in "upside down library" of the Egg in Anderlecht.  

The upside-down library at The Egg

We started off with a quick discussion of The Last Leaf by O. Henry (here's the text of it here: http://www.online-literature.com/donne/1303/).  

The Last Leaf is an example of a story that has a real inevitability (some said predictability).  We discussed how the structure of the story depended on integrating the different plot points into a coherent whole, or to put it less hideously, connecting the dots.

Stories have a structure, an architecture, and the conclusion of The Last Leaf is not just a right ending, it is the right ending, like the keystone in an arch.  It fits the story perfectly and holds the whole thing together.

Humans naturally make stories, and naturally connect the dots to make coherent narratives.  It affects the way we talk about people as well as history, the news, and incidents and anecdotes from our own lives.  Our next exercise was a series of questions designed to create a character.  It's a great exercise and it resulted in some very interesting, and surprisingly full-rounded characters (even if a disproportionate number of the characters resulting from the exercise turned out to be gay violinists).

(You can download a document outlining the exercise here: http://smallhushedwaves.blogspot.be/2013/03/twenty-questions.html)

The results of the exercise were varied and interesting.  If you ask a person to invent a detailed and rounded character in thirty seconds, most people would be stumped, but by answering these questions we join the dots and find ourselves describing a person who seems real and, perhaps more important, interesting.

Again, it's a matter of joining the dots and allowing our narrative instinct to impose a cohesive structure on the information we generate.  And the results seem somehow inevitable, satisfying and "right".  Usually given the questions asked there is only one person that this character could be.

Don't tell me you see a daffodil or a helicopter; this is a dinosaur!

Our last exercise was to choose an object, a location and an emotion and put them together to create a story.  

The challenge was to use the character we'd just created and to place them in the story, and it was great to see how the constraints imposed by the exercise became a spur to creativity.  By the end of the exercise, and the morning, everybody had a new character, rounded and developed, and a new story to write.

We're hoping to run another workshop in the summer and we look forward to building on the success of our first.

Twenty Questions

At the Egg last Saturday we conducted an exercise designed to create interesting rounded characters quickly.

You start out with a blank piece of paper.  You write the numbers from one to twenty at the side of the page, then answer these questions quite quickly, without thinking too hard about them, and without censoring yourself.   The result is usually surprising real and interesting characters.

We did it at the Nuts & Bolts workshop in the Egg, and got some really great results.  Workshop participants asked for copies of the questions asked, so here they are.

1. How old is this person?
2. What is their sex?
3. What is their ethnicity (this can incorporate race, religion, or any tribal loyalty or identity)?
4. When does this person live (I encouraged people to stick with their own time, but your character can live in Elizabethan times or 500 years in the future if you like)?
5. Where does this person live - a house, flat, castle, cave: what country or city?
6. Who, if anybody do they live with - family, friends, a dog?
7. What is the first thing you would notice about this person if you met them on the street or at a party?
8. Have they got any particular talent, skill or accomplishment? 
9. Name a secret that this person has, large or small.
10. What has it got in its pocketses - name an object that this person usually carries with them. (And while we're on the subject - does this person carry this thing in its pockets, or has he or she got a wallet, a handbag, a rucksack, a duffel bag?)
11. What is this person's greatest shame?
12. Who do they love most in the world?
13. What is their most valued possession?
14. Write down an ambition they have.
15. What is the first quality a friend would mention when describing this person?
16. What is the first thing this person themselves would mention?
17. Name something they are proud of.
18. Name a talent or quality they wish they had.
19. Write down something which people get wrong about this person, a false impression they often give.
20. Lastly: think of something else, that you could not have known about this person at the beginning of this exercise, but which, given the character you have created, makes sense.

Oh, and while we're at it, why not give them a name, for God's sake?

Another exercise involved choosing an object, a location and an emotion.  I got participants to pick from a list or to choose their own.  

Objects:

Guitar  

comb

birdcage

piano

USB stick

Gun

Letter

Flower

Mirror

Bottle

Key

Knife

Sandwich

Radio

Telephone

Hat

Locations:

teenage disco

sex shop

beach campfire

forest

airport

hospital

graveyard

church

street protest

bank

boardroom

campsite

monastery

submarine

embassy

theatre

library

emotions:

rage

lust

envy

affection

pathos

anxiety

grief

sexual jealousy

protectiveness

vengeance

doubt

fear

alienation

pride

shame

loss

The idea then was that by being constrained to connect object, place and emotion participants would come up with narratives to incorporate all three.  It's amazing how people seem naturally to find a shape to accommodate any three.

Just choosing at random - mirror, campsite, sexual jealousy - I find myself conjuring up, without thinking about it, a story about a boyfriend who becomes suspicious of his girlfriend because who needs a mirror on a camping trip - who is she trying to impress...?

Another - bottle, monastery, pathos - suggests a monk in an abbey, becoming a secret alcoholic, dependent on the beer made by his brothers, who in spite of the supposed closeness of the community, fail to see their brother's desperate loneliness.

Birdcage, theatre, doubt - an aging diva sees in a birdcage the image of her theatrical career, and calls into question her whole life's work.  (Quite camp, that last one.)

I think any one of those could make a good story (I like the first one best) and they all came without thinking too hard from the random association of things from the list.

(Incidentally, one very important story element which these exercise do not address is change.  We'll deal with that in another posting.)