Among the creative calisthenics I’ve used for my writing class is one that Thisbe Nissen provided for the excellent book, Naming the World, and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. She suggests having students take postcards and, right there on the spot, asking them to imagine a character who then composes a message upon it. It’s an exercise that’s supposed to get students quickly flexing their imaginations, using artifacts from the real world as props.
I liked the idea when I read about it. A couple of years ago, during a summer in Provincetown, I visited a junk shop and stumbled on a trunk of old vintage post cards. I riffled through them and selected those with photos that suggested untold stories. Finally I assembled a couple of dozen. The shop’s proprietor was so pleased that someone was taking a chunk of old postcards off his hands that he gave them to me at a steep discount.
A few months later after class started, I ran the exercise. With no disrespect to Ms. Nissen, the results were a bit of a dud. Oh, I followed her directions and asked the students in my seminar to envision the kind of person who might select their particular postcard. I had them write in the voice of this person. I also followed Nissen’s advice and suggested they swap postcards and reply to them. The idea here was that they’d jump into the thought processes of a second character as they pretended to be the recipient of the missive.
But the postcards the students wrote to each other were largely dull. They were nice. They all started with identical salutations and inquiries about the weather and hopes that all were well, followed by reassurances that they were having a good time in Bakersfield, CA/Plymouth, MI/Provincetown/Colonial Williamsburg/beautiful Bayonne, NJ. The replies were largely as insipid, expressing relief that all was well and urging the original sender to have a good time, and that everyone missed them in Waikiki/Austin, TX/Carowinds/Virginia Beach/Fort Bragg.
I tried to push home a message of “See? A few short minutes and you’ve got two characters and a premise for a story!”, but even a three-year-old could have seen through my false enthusiasm. Those stories wouldn’t have been anything I wanted to read.
This semester I was going to replace the exercise with something—anything—else, but heck. I still had the postcards. Maybe, I thought, I could revamp the exercise into somehow. Make it more interesting. Maybe the writing students envisioned in Naming the World were universally in MFA programs, and not the retirees, young working people, and moms who sign up for my classes. Maybe rather than speeding up the exercise so that the writers were jumping from new character to new character, I should be slowing everything down and let them reflect on what they’d written.
The last seemed a reasonable premise.
So this time around I added a period of meditation, after they’d chosen their picture postcard from the brown paper bag. I had them look at the photographs on front and, over the course of a couple of minutes, consider a number of questions.
Who was the person who might have selected such a card to send to someone? What kind of person—what kind of character—would have picked this particular postcard to send?
I asked them to take a moment to envision the character. Was it male or female? Was it someone contemporary? Someone in the past? Someone who was educated? Or perhaps someone who’d never made it past high school? Was this person a saint or a sinner, or somewhere in between?
I told them to take a moment to imagine why they were writing this postcard, to begin with. Did they pick it from a rack while they were vacationing? Did they send it to someone far away as a reminder of home? Did they find it tucked in a motel Bible? Did they steal it?
Who was the specific person to whom they were writing? Why was the character sending them a postcard rather than a letter? What’s their mood as they write?
I added a few more instructions before I let them begin. This character should not be you, I emphasized. This character does not have to think or behave like you would. The character does not have to be nice. He or she doesn’t have to be pleasant. She can be in a moment of crisis, or elation. The character can be a criminal or a sociopath. He can be an ordinary person who is involved in something extraordinary.
And most of all, I told them, skip the niceties. The greetings. The well-wishing. Your character doesn’t have time for that. Figure out why.
Then I let them write.
Although I gave them the same amount of time to compose their postcards this time as before—five minutes—this time around I asked them to do something different during the exercise’s sharing part. Show us your postcard first, I instructed. Then read us what you wrote, and say nothing more.
To the rest of the class, I said, It’s your job to tell us who this person is, based on the clues you find on this postcard. Imagine you’re a detective, and this is your one piece of evidence. What does every word tell you about the person who wrote it?
The first student read her postcard from Hawaii. It was addressed to B., from P., and contained a message about revisiting Hawaii, where they’d married twenty years before, in an attempt to get over a relationship that had failed after a decade. Though it was only a few sentences, I asked the students, What kind of person is P.?
At first the answers came slowly. They debated back and forth the sex of B. and P. respectively, Who flies to Hawaii on a whim to get over a ten-year-dead relationship?, I wanted to know. It was at this point that the class became excited. A hopeless romantic, they suggested. Someone with her head in the clouds. Someone who wasn’t entirely in touch with reality, who was of a certain affluence, who had a spur-of-the-moment spontaneity that maybe even overwhelmed her common sense.
The class then zeroed in on the line with which the character had signed off—“Don’t show this to your wife!” This woman was very naïve, they reasoned, because after all even the postman could read what she’d said, if he wanted. Perhaps she was even willfully destructive. Maybe she wanted the wife to see the postcard from the ex arrive in the mail, to read the message, and to cause friction between the two.
I let the listeners debate for a while and read all the possible nuances into the scenario before I turned to the woman who’d actually written the fictional postcard. I released her from her silence to tell us how she’d envisioned the character she’d fleshed out in a few sentences. I’d never seen someone so excited to talk in class before. She confirmed that indeed she’d pictured a scatterbrained woman of middle age who’d revisited the site of her wedding on a whim. But she began to spin not only some backstory for the woman—she’d been visiting not just the site of the wedding, but all the spots across the country that had meant something to her during the couple’s courtship—but some of the unrevealed after-story as well: she’d decided to fight to get her ex-husband back.
The students wanted to know if the final sentence had been deliberate relationship sabotage—almost in the same way that fans must badger George R. R. Martin for unwritten Game of Thrones spoilers. “You know, I honestly don’t know!” she exclaimed, and paused. Her eyes were dancing with possibility.
“Do mine next!” one student exclaimed. “It fits perfectly!”
I let her show her card, which was a series of colored patio umbrellas somewhere in California. She read the card aloud—it was from a man who addressed his postcard to ‘Jackie, Darling,’ and peppered her with questions. “Are you startled to hear from me? Are you surprised I’ve made it all the way out to California? Do you want to know why I’m here?” The listeners drilled right into the text to wring every nuance out of it. The guy was obviously controlling, and dominant, and even a little bit scary, maybe. They debated what ‘all the way out to California’ meant—was he from a city on the east coast? Or some podunk town where anyplace in California sounded exotic and wildly sophisticated?
This woman, given the chance at last to speak, loved what she’d heard. She’d envisioned her character as a fast-talking lothario, sure of himself and of his good looks, who simply assumed that no matter how much time had passed since the last time he’d seen one of his conquests, that she’d still be madly head over heels with him. She and the first woman laughed at the notion that perhaps their postcards were the separate halves of the same story.
But they could be, I pointed out. They absolutely could be connected. Or they could be separate worlds of their own. What kind of stories could these two strong personalities generate?
Another woman in the class had crafted a lovely card about a boy in college who was a dreamer, who harbored longing feelings for a girl inappropriate for him; we spoke at length about how we saw him, based on the very few sentences she’d written. Another had written a grimmer postcard about a pilgrimage to a cemetery in Cape Cod. After several minutes of spirited debate, she filled us in with a richly-textured backstory about the character had involved a short-lived marriage, the death of a husband, property in Boston, a woman’s retreat in Arizona, and a late-in-life acceptance of her own lesbianism.
“I think it’s remarkable that you,” I told this woman, and then broadened it to include them all, “that you all started with seven and a half square inches of postcard and five minutes to write on it, and have generated enough imaginative possibility to fill pages and pages and chapters, and even a book’s worth of story.”
They all agreed, eyes shining. I couldn’t have felt any better, or any more excited, about the results. I still get a giddy feeling when I think about it.
The postcard workout flopped the first time, for me, because it never skimmed any deeper than the surface. The second time around, it was uncanny how much depth it brought out—how much wild, raw imagination was at work over the course of only a few minutes. The students confirmed to each other that even a few sentences of their own writing could be incredibly evocative; hearing their words explored and interpreted and wrung of nuance not only validated the bits they’d done right, but opened up vast possibilities for the story’s future.
Five minutes and a postcard, and some careful reflection afterward. That’s all it took for me to end up with a shelf of books I’d want to read.
No comments:
Post a Comment