On Saturday, September 27, Tennessee Mountain Writers had their annual Fall Workshop in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This year’s workshop leader was Darnell Arnoult, who is a masterful writer across genres but focused on nonfiction/memoir for the purposes of our workshop.
If you’ve ever had a workshop or class with Darnell, you know ahead of time, there’s going to be some good list-making coming up in your time with her. One of her exercises that day was to write down ten memories and with each memory, to include four sensory details. The next thing you do is assign one memory as the one with the highest energy to it and one with the lowest energy to it. Then you take the highest-energy memory and write about it for a set amount of time (I think it was ten or fifteen minutes). Then you take the lowest-energy memory and write about it for a set amount of time (again, it was either ten or fifteen minutes). Often, what you find is that the “lowest-energy” memory becomes the one you write about more passionately. It becomes the memory you somehow connect to more than the highest-energy memory. At any rate, if you did what she told you to do in the first place, you have ten story ideas waiting to be explored!
Another prompt she used this time was “I remember” and we used that phrase four times about the same incident/place/memory. Then “I don’t remember” about it. Then “I wish I could remember” about it. Followed up with “If I could take a picture, it would be of…” I ended up writing about my cousins and me at the public pool in summertime when we were kids. It was great to revisit that place and those times.
Then the serious list-making began. These were ideas to use later, but included things like “List Every Place You Ever Lived,” List Every Job You’ve Ever Had,” List Every Teacher You’ve Ever Had,” “List Every Friend You Can Remember,” List Every Relative You Can Remember,” “First Kitchen You Can Remember,” “Describe a Room: Tell Something That Happened in the Next Room,” First Date/Heartbreak/Kiss,” and “First Home Away from Home.”
A couple of quotes she had that day that stuck with me? “The story is the point.” (When somebody says, “Get to the point.”) And, “It’s not about organizing; it’s about unleashing.”
Our next activity was a visual one. Put a memory in a circle and have lines going out from that main circle for each action or emotion you felt in relation to that main memory. The lines can go to more than one circle, they can crisscross. And it’s a way or getting details down to write a story.
The final activity was Darnell giving us a list of numbers (3, 5, 10, 7, 21, 4, 6, 10, 5, 1). Next, we had to pick a memory from the original list of ten. Then, we had to write a sentence about the memory with that many words in it. The idea is, once you finish, you have a ten-sentence story from the memory you chose. Each sentence must stand on its own, no carry-overs to the next line. It’s a brilliant way to tell a story!
But Darnell is a brilliant teacher. If you’ve never experienced that firsthand, email her at darndarn [at] gmail [dot] com and find out when her next Mining the Motherlode class is. It’s the best $30 you can spend in three hours of creating!
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