Random Little Writing Exercises
notes scrawled on a Tuesday evening
Potential Uses for a Watch:
-To tell the time (duh)
-To accessorize
-To take off and throw at an attacker to distract them momentarily
Uses for a Brick
-To build a house
-To hit someone with
-To sink something with
-To use as a weight
-To decorate and display
-To trip someone with (?)
-To hold something in place with
-A doorstop
One of my favourite writers is Emma Cline. She’s red-haired and feels quintessentially millenial to me somehow. She always looks very serious in pictures, and the tone of her writing is quite serious too. All of her narrators, though, are the type of girl who sells her underwear on Craigslist and writes to perverted American men in chatrooms pretending to be a sixteen-year-old cheerleader. I find it interesting: you imagine while reading her book that this life must be the sort of life she has or had, this girl must be the sort of girl she is (and you get a strong sense of this from the personal essays that she has written, in addition to the novels and short stories). I guess it makes me wonder… she has done all of these frivolous, dangerous things, but then she goes home and writes about them with the thoughtfulness of Margaret Atwood or Mary Gaitskill. It’s like she houses two (or many more) personalities inside one woman. I really like that.
Personal Inspiration
Strange that the first inspirational women who come to my mind are always yogis from Vancouver. A beautiful yoga teacher from my past, Sophie. I feel that her views on men and relationships are strange and borderline harmful, and yet somehow everything in her life has worked out perfectly. So then there’s another part of me that believes she must know exactly what she’s talking about. If she has created a perfect life for herself then how could she not? Does that really happen by accident?
Ideal Writing Conditions
If I was still living at home, in Vancouver, I would sit in my favourite lovely blue chair in the living room, instrumental music playing. In the morning but not too early—after I’ve done yoga (because I used to be a YOGA GIRL though now I am not but for the purposes of this exercise I am again) and before the afternoon hits. I must learn to love writing here the way I did at home, before.