Dorothy Allison
HERE ARE A FEW WAYS I GET MY STUDENTS TO START stories.
Essentially, I make them write a piece beginning with the line “I never told anyone …”
The trick is that I change how I set this exercise up all the time. Sometimes I read some brief piece of fiction—first-person, self-revelatory, strong voice. I change what I read as often as I can, trying to choose something they might not have read recently. (I love to pull something from the back of my bookcase—there is a short story taken out of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love that I used a lot for a while, and a piece of James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. That is the quality of thing I use.)
Then I make them close their eyes, and I let this long silence happen. That is very important. Make them a little nervous, so they will focus. Then I tell them to take up their pens and write the first line—“I never told anyone …”—and go from there.
They'll write for ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes. If they flag or if I am feeling particularly irritable, I stop them, have them set aside what they started, take up a new piece of paper, and begin again. This time the line is:
“I did tell one person. God help me. She/he …”
That makes a completely different and interesting story, but I have been using it for only a couple of years, so I can't say it is as good as the other. It does, however, take the story away from memoir, so I sometimes like it a lot.
Sometimes I do a physical variation on this exercise. I get the participants to tighten every muscle in their bodies, just squeeze as hard as they can, and then release. If they are resistant or laugh, I make them do it a couple of times. Then I give them the line without reading anything:
“I never told anyone, but I'll tell you …”
Funny thing is that with the last approach, there is a strong tendency for someone to get weepy.
Start a story or stories with one of the following lines:
“I never told anyone …”
“I did tell one person. God help me. She/he …”
“I never told anyone, but I'll tell you …”