Join us here for writing assignments that spark your imagination and clarify your life!
I’ve been teaching life story and journal writing for almost 20 years to people of all ages, occupations and places in their lives. These exercises are designed to accompany you on your discovery process whether you are looking to get more from the present and future, an improved connection to work, family, and values or believe that in the writing you will somehow be moved by the process and opened to a place you might not have anticipated.
We write for many reasons:
- to answer the question: is there something about my life that is missing, some direction or purpose I’m not seeing?
- to take strength and direction from the creative process
- to make sense of what seems fluid, jumbled, bizarre and wonderful
- to leave a trace, a sign that we were here
- to see another set of interpretations of our story that can help us live more fully
- to embark on writing and to see the myriad ideas, images and emotions that surface that may express themselves in unforeseen ways
Pico Iyer says we travel first to loose ourselves and then discover who we are. Writing is like traveling, it changes us in ways we cannot imagine
The exercises below are for current students of mine at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education in Cambridge MA. You are welcome to use them. Let me know what works for you!
Assignment #1 (due week #2) : The Whole Pumpkin
1) Think of your life story as a work in progress that had a beginning at some point (it
may have begun before or after your actual birth. Muse on that span of years and write down 2 titles that evoke your story. Aim for sensory images that hint at ambiguity because in order to want to write about your life, you need to feel drawn into it as though there’s something to learn from the writing. You are not merely recording what happened, you’re making sense of it, right? So 2 titles please. (Small Boat on a Rough Sea / Waiting on the Silvery Cloud)
2) Once you’ve done that, divide your blessed life into chapters, each one having a chapter with a title–assume you have about a dozen chapters in your life, not 3 and not 55! Give each a chapter title. Reflect on these chapter titles for through them you have created a simple Table of Contents for your writing. Of course, life story writing is not that simple because your story will change as you write it and Book titles will become Chapter titles and you’ll see new light and area of darkness that will start you off again with a fresh perspective. Choose one of the chapter titles to start with and write 2 pages. Don’t write a 2-page version of the chapter but rather, 2 pages of what might be a 125 page chapter!
3) To help keep you loose, consider each day of your current life, a day of travel. Bring the same awareness you have when you travel to the very day you are in. At the end of each day, summarize it and give it a title. Do this for several weeks and see what happens.
4) Start creating a time line of your life. A simple one will do at first–a line with year dates will do. This will help you start to sort out what substance hit which object at what time and for what duration! Your time line can be a swirl, a swoop, a hat or anything really but at some point, it’s good to have a simple straight line roadmap that prompts you to remember and accumulate the remembered pieces into an ever expandable format. Consider using Post-its on a long roll of paper with each year given a few inches of paper space to fill over time. Variations on creating time lines will follow in subsequent weeks.
Assignment #2 (Due week#3): Coloring the Pumpkin
1) Memories are hard to retrieve directly. The familiar ones pop to the surface but the more nuanced ones often need a prompt of some kind to pull out. In this group of exercises we focus on how memories and eras are color coded. What was the color (or colors) of your childhood? Who are the purple men you know? When were you a peachy orange color? As I write this assignment, I realize it sounds a little cheesy–or like a birthday party game for an 8 year old. In any case, try to stick with it–it sounded better in class than as a blog!
Okay, so, imagine your time line is made of colors instead of notes. All kinds of colors weaving and intersecting and disappearing only to be taken over by other colors. What color was your job with GE? What were the colors of dawn the day after Henry was born? What colors were you when you fell in love with Lucy? Memories can be coded for retrieval that can be retrieved in other ways, same way with smell and touch that we’ll talk about later. So, cutting do the chase, take 10 minutes to create a colored version of your life. Be impulsive, be wild–don’t look too closely at what you’re doing at the moment. You’re aiming to open your life for review, not dissect it or weigh it.
2) Choose some point on your color time line and write about it for 5 minutes. Choose another and write about it for 5 minutes. Try to use the spirit of the colors to write with. What does Prussian Blue writing sound like? Naples Yellow writing?
3)Travel in your day appreciating the vividness of it and at the end reflect on its colors and title. Record that information each day this week.
4) Write 2 pages towards some part of your life story.
Assignment #3 (due week #4): Listening to the Pumpkin and taking its temperature too
What happened in class: As part of our in-class nonsense, everyone had a piece of white paper and a colored marker. We moved fast as each of us doodled on the paper and then passed it to the left. With 20 people making marks, squiggles and loops on every paper, we got our original back in a greatly enhanced form! We wrote about the experience, found secrets messages in the squiggles and then gave the page a title. We then looked for times in our lives for which our piece of paper were an illustration. We then wrote about that. What follows is the “homework” from that session.
A) Scan your history for memorable sounds. Traffic at 5am, the wind in the Pyrenees, the hiss and rattle of Dad’s pressure cooker. Make a list of them and then add them to your existing timeline (see timeline exercise above) or create a new timeline for sounds. Each of these sounds may be an entry into a whole set of memories opened by the sound associated by one of them.
B) Using sound to point the way to a story that appeals to you, write 2 pages for class. Be aware of the contribution sounds can make to the liveliness of your writing by including it directly( “grrrrr”) or indirectly (“He growled like a bear in heat!”).
C) Consider the role of temperature in locating story memory. Think of times you nearly froze or boiled or hovered in your energy conscious wintery home at 62degrees! Metaphorically speaking, what temperatures were childhood? What temperature was high school? Your 3rd lover? The work you did for GE ? What is today’s temperature? What memories surface when using temperature as a search concept? Add them to your timeline and note them in your imagination for possible story material.
D) We will be writing in class on week #5 for an hour. Be reflecting on what you may want to write given the silent creative pressure of 20 people working in a focused way on a piece of writing!
(Remember that on week #7, you’re invited to submit 8 pages to our term publication!)
Assignment #4 (due week #5): Finding objects from the Pumpkin’s life and getting ready to write with prompts for an hour in class
- Scan your living spaces for objects that may help you recall periods in your life that are signaling to you. To help frame this exercise, consider that you had an hour to tell us your life story. Given that premise, what objects would help you tell that story? These may be literal objects (the key to your father’s beloved lawnmower) or metaphoric / symbolic (a pickle because your family always seemed resourceful when it was in a pickle but could never really hold itself together in everyday life). Other objects may just show themselves to you and you can’t quite figure out why but they’re signaling nonetheless (finding theatre tickets you never used but never threw away).
- Free write 2 times this week using objects as prompts instead of words.
- Write 2 pages towards your life story. These 2 pages may or may not be inspired by objects but as you write, consider adding descriptive and other narrative elements that build on early assignments. For example, consider adding color and temperature elements to your writing along with certain objects that can enrich the narrative detail and help advance character development.
I waited for him to respond but all his attention lay focused on the worn blue yearbook in his hand as though he hoped the answer to my question lay inside it.
selecting objects
