Tom Bligh
MY FAVORITE EXERCISES GENERATE WORK DRASTICALLY different from what I've been producing. Structures, focused tasks, and prompts can send writers into their creative zones. Such exercises free a writer from working within familiar patterns or with the usual obsessions and set that same writer—with that same talent—off toward something less certain. The results are often impressive.
Let's say you're writing a story in which the protagonist thinks her boyfriend is cheating on her. Your story is rich in character and energy but lacks incident and story. You're having trouble with plot and form. Try borrowing a familiar structure from a fairy tale. Superimpose the existing draft over a fairy tale's structure, like so: the protagonist decides she must find three pieces of evidence before she confronts her boyfriend. She's on a quest! The protagonist now has three specific tasks to complete in order to achieve her ultimate goal: knowledge. And you have some structure.
Look for examples of stories or poems that draw on fairy tales, legends, or myths. Some examples are: “Cinderella” by Anne Sexton, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter, Alan Jay Lerner's script for My Fair Lady, and Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. Margaret Atwood's subtle and subversive retelling of Goldilocks in “Wilderness Tips” is worth a look. By all means check out Janet Burroway's brilliant diagram of Cinderella's plot in Writing Fiction. For kicks, read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, then watch Star Wars and identify the elements common to almost all mythic journey stories. The goal here is to gain a better understanding of how stories work: that one thing happens after another, that a story sets up its own rules and then characters struggle against them. You want your work to bust out of the humdrum by tapping into something ancient and perhaps universal.
Model a scene on a fairy tale, legend, or myth. The tone can be humorous or serious.