Sunday, December 1, 2013

CREATIVE WRITING: Explosion and Drawing as Writing Exercises



"Explosion" is a word used in creative writing. This basically means expanding your writing.  For  example one can intially write: "She went up to his flat." You could rewrite this to give more details, making your work "explode."  For instance: "She went up his modern flat."  And making it explode some more: "She slowly went up to his modern flat at 8 in the morning."  And so on.

You can get bits of text and make it grow.






At the Writers' Retreat I attended last July, we had to draw a room or place that's part of our works-in-progress. I did the following drawing, which clearly is not a work of art, but this sketch allowed me to imagine better the setting. It triggered my unconscious to write more about the setting. The drawing allowed the initial draft to "explode."




Let me share with you a novel excerpt after the drawing and expansion. This is from my novel-in-progress:



"And so one Sunday, after stopping by the patisserie to pick up some cakes, I arrived at his flat. There were four flights of stairs, narrow, winding and dark. Remembering how quickly my aunt had lost her balance when she broke her leg, I hung on to the banister and carefully negotiated the stairs. Each floor had two apartments, but I saw no one and I wondered where people were this Sunday morning. Up and up I climbed and then when I reached the top, suddenly there was light that burst through the darkness. Looking up I searched for the source of all that brilliance and saw a huge skylight that glowed like the moon. The golden light gave me a feeling of lightness, of joy, and I savored the moment."
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The techniques of explosion and drawing can be very useful to novelists and other writers. So in essence, you write a draft, and then you can pull out "thin" sections of the draft and expand it with more detail, more fleshing-out.
For your own exercise, get a pencil and piece of paper, and do a simple sketch of where your story or a part of your story takes place. Now let your written work "explode" by writing about the descriptive and other details you have learned from the drawing exercise.
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Read Also.
For fiction, read:
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This is all for now,


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