Soapbox: The Way I see Things

This blog post is part of an effort to refine my own work as a writer, and to strengthen my practice as a writing teacher. For each exercise, I’ll provide the directions, my effort, and a short reflection.

The Assignment: I’ll get real here. I wasn’t a huge fan of how things turned out for my short sentence experiment. I went back to the Ursula Le Guin text, and she suggested trying to change voice for a new attempt. So, if the writing was originally narrative, change it up to something more directive. So I gathered my notebook, my water bottle and sunglasses, and sat out on the porch to give this exercise another go.

HOW TO START A DAY: PRIMER FOR A WORKING MAMA

Your alarm buzzes you awake. It’s too late. Your bladder already signals. Take a moment. Inhale your day. Try not to feel its weight. Exhale. Stretch your muscles. Feel your joints. Decide which one is sorest.
Shuffle to the bathroom. Try not to look in the mirror. There are better times. Glare askance at the scale. It is not your friend.
Start the shower. Step in. Let a moment wash over you. Wander into loose thought. Realize you’ve stood still four minutes. It might be a record. Snap back. There is soaping to do.
The bar slips. You quickly calculate. Better to let it fall. No need for heroics. There is dignity in that move.
You pick up again. You begin once more. Your mind tallies up obligations. Better stop now. You don’t want to take all day. You’d run out of water.
Decide it is time to move on. Heave a sigh. Grab a towel. Make it two. You need any coverage you can get.
Pick up your clothes. You laid them out last night. Commend yourself for your foresight. Now open the closet. Put on something different. It’s not much better.
It will do. It will have to do. It will all have to do.

Reflection: This was a fun one! I’m glad I took some time to go back and attempt this exercise with a different tone. Granted, it doesn’t paint a terribly rosy picture of life as a working parent, but I find it pretty accurate.

I also had fun layering on meanings through word play – like “stood still four (for) minutes” – or “the bar slides downward.” Ohh, yes. The bar is ALWAYS sliding downward in life, isn’t it? It’s the only way to stay sane sometimes. The soap passage also reminds me of a poem I wrote a few years ago with the same theme. Guessing the overworked, overwhelmed parent trope still holds a lot of mileage for me. Figuring it will for the foreseeable future.

This blog post is part of an effort to refine my own work as a writer, and to strengthen my practice as a writing teacher. For each exercise, I’ll provide the directions, my effort, and a short reflection.

The Assignment: Craft a passage (up to 350 words) within a single sentence. Punctuation and complex clauses are welcome!

She thought of July as the time that unfurled its way ahead of her with the summer that lay spread out like an overstretched weekend – these many weeks being a delightful lazy Saturday, on which day a teacher can slough off the Friday weight of the fall, the winter, the spring; on which day she may sleep in, take untimed bathroom breaks, enjoy meals unpunctuated by bells and whistles; on which day a teacher can fully inhale; on which day she may take walks – long rambles with no clear plan, objective, goal, agenda, benchmark, or attempt at measuring mastery; on which day endless streams of questions and requests and situations give way to chirping birds, rustling leaves and the drone of cicadas; on which day the endless grind of preparing and implementing the precise logistics of obligations comes to a virtual standstill; she knows Sunday is coming, and she knows that although Sunday, with its accompanying rise in pressure, anxiety, and (from time to time) dread my crouch around the corner, today is a different day.

Reflection: Well, this passage is definite proof that I often write from my own experience! I often notice a theme of protagonists overwhelmed or weighted down by obligation. Can’t imagine how that would come to be.

I did have fun, though, with extending this outsized sentence with a full tool belt of punctuation at the ready. I felt much better about this exercise than the one that required me to forgo ALL punctuation other than the ending mark. I might find a way to try and share this one with my colleagues somehow…

This blog post is part of an effort to refine my own work as a writer, and to strengthen my practice as a writing teacher. For each exercise, I’ll provide the directions, my effort, and a short reflection.

The Assignment: Craft a paragraph using short sentences (maximum 7 words each). No sentence fragments are allowed!

FIRST ATTEMPT
Among it all, I sit. Sunlight lulls my eyes closed. I offer a moment of meditation. Sweat descends down my neck. The breeze lifts it away. A fly lands on my arm. It breaks my trance. Steady hums of cicadas pull me back. I store these days for February.

Mini-Reflection: This is a nice slice of life, but it’s also much shorter than the 100 or so words Ursula Le Guin called for. This writing feels more like a cop-out. I pushed myself towards another attempt.

NEXT ATTEMPT
Time to get up. She sniffs, scratches, stretches. Ambles over to the bed. An arm hangs over the side. She huffs, then nudges. The arm stays limp. She huffs, nudges, then growls. Fingers wiggle. She nudges, then grumbles again. A hand scrunches fur, then absently strokes. She wags, then she licks. She licks some more. She keeps licking until her human wakes. He sniffs, scratches, stretches. Time to get up.

Reflection: I can’t say I’m overwhelmed by the writing I did for either of these passages. I’m glad I was able to create a couple of vivid moments. For me, the biggest challenge was avoiding sentence fragments. As a poet, I like being able to play with language in that way, and it’s kind of a bummer that I had my hands tied with that one.

This blog post is part of an effort to refine my own work as a writer, and to strengthen my practice as a writing teacher. For each exercise, I’ll provide the directions, my effort, and a short reflection.

The Assignment: Craft a passage using NO punctuation. Gulp. Here was my go:

He tied his shoes yes all by himself found his way to the garage and his bike and pedal pedal pedaled himself all the way down the block and around the corner past the mean old people house and across the street to the far park with the tall slide and the not creaky swings and the circling circling sickening circling merry go round but what he was looking for and what he really came for was just ahead of him in the sandbox and all he had to do was cross to the scratchy diggy crane but as he almost sat a hand grabbed his shoulder and a voice said WHERE IS YOUR MOTHER YOUNG MAN and he tried to speak or squeak but he must have dropped his voice in the sand so he got back on his bike and pedal pedal pedaled across the street past the mean old people house around the corner and up the block before leaving his bike his shoes his courage at the doorstep.

Reflection: No punctuation at ALL? That was tricky, having to toss aside not just commas and periods, but hyphens, ellipses, parentheses. Maybe I’m whining, but it’s hard to set a piece of writing out into the world with no help for my readers on how to hear those words in their heads.

I do think that my protagonist and his stream-of-consciousness thought made for a good match for this type of writing. Still, at some point, as the book advises, I may go back and toy with this one to see how adding punctuation changes the power of the piece.