Try This at Home: A Writing Prompt
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
How daunting do you find the blank page? How intimidating—this inescapable fact that stories have been written and told and retold and critiqued and embossed and fictionalized and exposed as autobiography (and vice versa) since the beginning of time? Is there anything left to write? Any impact we can have, as writers writing today?
I used to wonder about this all time. Then I stumbled over a few stunning little facts in Richard Lederer's book, THE MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE. He makes the claim that, with the exception of everyday phrases like "How are you?" and "I am fine," most of the sentences we speak are not borrowed, but our own. We may think we are seeing the same thing as someone else, we may be absolutely sure that we are thinking about it in the same way, but in the end, we find our own way to tell the story.
Choose a photograph. Gather a group of friends. Give yourselves just 20 words—no more, no less—to tell the story of the photograph. Take five minutes, and compare your work. Chances are that each of you have now composed the beginning of utterly different stories.
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