Wednesday Writing Group Insights

Wednesday's are the day that I attend writing group at work. It's not only a nice break to the day and week but its usually very inspiring and as I found out today can teach you a lot about yourself. Today there were 4 of us and our exercise went as follows:

Step 1: Someone picked a random word & we wrote it down on our sheet of paper
Step 2: Each of us picked a second word & wrote it down on our sheet of paper
Step 3: We passed our papers to the left & wrote our second word on our neighbours sheet. We continued to pass our papers, each time writing our second word on the sheet until our paper came back to us.
Step 4: Each of us picked a third word & wrote it down on our sheet of paper.
Step 5: We passed our papers to the left & wrote our third word on our neighbours sheet. We continued to pass our papers, each time writing our third word on the sheet until our paper came back to us.
Step 6: We now had nine words on our sheet and we had 15 minutes to write poetry, prose or what-have-you based on the words. The real catch? You must use the words in order. The idea is to write & not worry about punctuation or grammar-that can always be fixed later.

The really interesting thing about this exercise was that we all ended up with the same words on our papers but they were all in different order and I found it so interesting and inspiring to see the very different results. Three poems resulted and I wrote prose. Here are the words in my order & my result:

Wildflower
Skylight
Mystic
Battlefield
Seeds
Manic
Oaken
Parsnip
Deadhead

Wildflower stood beneath the skylight in her parents home with the sun streaming down on her and making her warm. This feeling of being alone, an orphan, was new to her; she was now completely on her own.

Her seventy-four year old mother had finally succumbed to pneumonia two weeks earlier on a day that she liked to think had mystic qualities. She thought back fondly to the serenity of the day. As her family was aboriginal Wildflower had requested the elders of their nation preside over her mothers final moments. They smoked the peace pipe and lit sweet grass to ease her passing. As the only progeny of her parents union, Wildflower had fought alone on the battlefield of Alzheimers with first her father and then finally her mother. She was spent and exhausted but she could feel the seeds of change taking root in her heart.

With an almost manic sense of needing to be free she pushed open the oaken door to the back yard. She stepped into the beautiful day and then meandered into her mother's vegetable garden. The parsnips were growing, the tomato's would soon be ready to harvest. The Echinacea plants, her mothers favorite healing herb, stood tall. She deadheaded a few of the purple flowers and held the blooms in her hands. This was a time of healing.

So I wouldn't consider this a fabulous piece of writing but its not bad for thinking on your feet & getting the words in order. Most importantly, I'll take this scene and insert elements in another piece that I'm working on. If there is anything that I'm proud of its the part about having "fought on the battlefield of Alzheimer's" & I will most certainly use that line again.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned from the exercise today is that over the past several weeks I've written a number of times about individuals stepping through doors symbolically to a change or a new life. I laughed when I realized that this parallels my life & is the way I'm feeling about a lot of things. It was an insightful moment.

Why don't you get together with a couple of friends and give the exercise at try. Who knows what personal realizations you might come out with.
©Salynne Wilde 2009