Writing exercise and first drafts....

[nadinbrzezinski]

First drafts….

August 14, 2009 at 4:31 am · Filed under Blogroll, Writing · Edit

Heminway once said that first drafts are crap. I agree. First drafts are crap. Repeat this, first drafts are crap. This is where writing is rewiriting comes in. Still, I will share a first draft with you today. This is an exercise I got out from one of my writing books… and I figured this would be one for you to try. It is easy, it is fast, and it helps.

So here you go, the exercise…

Ok here is a little exercise from one of my writing books. Essentially it helps to get juices flowing, or to get the weaving of prose in place. So here it is. Choose a piece of prose, or lines of poetry, and weave around them a story.

The second use a dream, any dream, and write about it. They don’t have to be necessarily connected.

The third part, weave them together… into a piece of prose.

Of course this vignette also works for my future US project, but I thought I’d share. And here is an example of this… remember, it is truly… crap… as this is a first draft… but hey…

Choose some lines of poetry…(or prose) you happen to like. (For me it was a piece from Wilfred Owen’s poetry)

I knew the world changed. “With a thousand fears that vision face was ingrained,” The fear was deep. “The hopelessness” that was deep that day. It was a nightmare that none of us could imagine. The deep sense of distress that we all saw that day. The deep sense of the world changed. The sense that enemies lurked and friends, perhaps, could never be trusted. The sense that the world changed.

A dream…

The day came to my relief. It was the end of a nightmare, where buildings fell and ships sank, and mushroom clouds rose. It was the end of the day when we knew. It was the beginning of a real nightmare. A nightmare of rendition, and torture where morals were destroyed and we could say or do what we wanted. It was the end of a nightmare, or was that the beginning?

Weave it together…

The way the world changed was not easy to explain. It was sudden and fear weaved through all we did. We walked in a daze for a few days. We knew that the end of the Republic was on us. We knew that the new nations were very different from what once existed. It was, the day all our fears came to be. It was the end of the day when all our hopes were dashed. It was, the moment that the nightmare started. This was the real nightmare, not the nightmares of my dreams, or the hopes in my waking hours. It was the end, it was the beginning. It was the Alpha and the Omega. It was… to be.

When the revolution came it was sudden. Nobody expected it, and it was not televised. The Governor came on the Tube and told us this. We are no longer part of the Republic and god help them if they try. They mobilized us, all of us, into the Self Defense Militia. We stood ready. They never tried. Perhaps because others followed us to Independence, or did we follow them? I will never know, as the heady days flowed in ways that most of us were shocked and surprised. To us it was a change, and a change that we looked forwards.

These days this new utopia is no-longer the way we imagined. It is a nightmare where the few benefit at the expense of the many. We wonder if we did the right thing? We wonder, as we are now truly hopeless to the end of the world that we hoped for, and the beginning of the real life nightmare…