Week 1 - Exercise 1

Write a page of narrative that's meant to be read aloud. Use anything you can to make it sound good. Write for pleasure - to play. Just listen to the sounds and rhythms and play with them like a kid with a kazoo. This isn't 'free writing' but it's similar you’re relaxing control: you’re encouraging the words themselves—the sounds of them, the beats and echoes—to lead you on. For the moment, forget all the good advice that says good style is invisible, good art conceals art. Show off! Use the whole orchestra our wonderful language offers us! Write it for children, if that’s the way you can give yourself permission to do it. Write it for your ancestors. Use any narrating voice you like. If you’re familiar with a dialect or accent, use it instead of vanilla English. Be very noisy, or be hushed. Make what happens happen in the sounds of the words, the rhythms of the sentences. Have fun, play, repeat, invent, feel free. Remember—no rhyme, no regular meter. I hesitate to suggest any “plot,” but if you need some kind of hook to hang the language up on. Or make up an island and start walking across it—what happens?

Sunday the 13th

12pm - 150 E 42nd St, #34

In this session people will have the chance to talk about their own work or respond to the exercise below taken from Steering the Craft by Le Guin. Here are the people's work who they want you to read before or during the session, textme for the passwords