First Major Assignment & Guidelines and Prompts

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First Major Assignment & Guidelines and Prompts

This is your first major assignment. Presentation Day for Students in First Presentation Group is on September 20th, and for students in Second Presentation Group is on September 27th and October 4th. You are working individually. The group assignment is merely to facilitate presentation time and order.

Guidelines:

Word count to aim for: 1000 to 1500 words. Or if you are combining writing with other media (you own photography, audio files, etc.) then, strike the best balance for the piece you are making.

First Assignment Focus

For this first assignment, the focus is on character and action in storytelling and in the imagination act. How characters serve as vehicles to explore potential scenarios for real world and/or fantastical futures. The act of playing pretend is central to the imagination and creating narratives, events, experiences, and story design involves lots of pretend!

One of the things that makes the current historical moment difficult, among many, is that due to the climate emergency, the concept of a future is uncertain and in question. It makes the art of imagining a story and taking the leap of faith with it an even more utopian endeavor than usual. But the possibility of imagining a story into being is already an act of faith that there will at least be a future reader, viewer/audience, even if that person or group of people are to be met tomorrow and not twenty years from now.

The act of storytelling is also one that involves a negotiation with a reader or viewer in the past or what I like to call the ghosts of the long ago. You could think of this as writing/making work to speak with your ancestors, for instance. Novelist Isabel Allende famously wrote her first novel initially as a letter to her dying grandfather, and that letter then became the book The House of the Spirits.

 Working with characters and the things they do/say is a great place to start because it immediately puts the work in motion. Sometimes as writers/thinkers we struggle with big concepts for our work and that can get in the way of just diving into the act of play. So, for this first task, I am asking you to give yourself permission to explore characters and actions first, which means exploring the given circumstances of situations characters are in.

Lots of stories focus on the workplace or the home. Some focus on family(ies) and others on people living alone and finding connections to others. Some stories are set in the world of national or global politics, others are situated in the domestic sphere. There are many kinds of storytelling – fantasy, action, crime, horror, realism, naturalism, comedy, tragedy, satire, romantic comedy or tragedy, and so forth. Knowing what mode and genre you are in, even if you mix things up, is helpful as you work. Because as much as characters and action locate a piece of writing, so does the modality.

Make choices early in your process! Even if along the way, these choices will change.

Much of the creative process involves the tension between making a bold concrete choice and then giving yourself and the work permission to evolve and transform, if it feels necessary or organic to the process.

Prompts for this assignment (choose one or more to kick-start your work)

a) Imagine a person with an idiosyncratic way of seeing the world. allow the character to witness an event (dramatic or significant in some way) that does not directly involve them. if writing prose, have the character narrate the event from first person POV, making sure the perspective is built on the manner in which this person uniquely sees the world. If you are writing for film or stage, allow the character to be in conversation with someone else or a group of people.

b) create a character based on the following sentence “Nobody has ever loved me as much as I loved him/her/them.” think of the sentence as a kind of mathematical formula. who is the person speaking to and why? are what they say unreliable?

c) imagine a character who is kind, who carries with them an essential goodness. follow them as an agent of kindness in the storytelling.

d) write a sequence of scenes where confusion or chaos follows a character. the person does not cause the chaos, but disorder happens every time they leave a scene or encounter.

e) write a story set in the wilderness.

f) the past is always present. consider this as you write a scene. how do actions of the past affect the present circumstances of characters in the present?

g) imagine a character in a scene. they are an expert mimic. they take on other people’s mannerisms and vocal tics. they shift and adapt according to whom they are with. explore how the mimicry gets them into trouble.

h) write a scene where you cannot proceed without at some point rolling dice. the outcome of each turn in the scene is determined by the dice roll.