Exercise One: Recognizing and Re-Energizing Cultural Scripts
First things first. In order to get to know each other, I’d like you to post a brief introduction to the e-mail list, if you haven't yet done so. Please let the others taking the workshop know who you are, something about your interests, what you’re writing or would like to be writing, and anything else you’d like to add.
For this exercise, you should familiarize yourself with cultural scripts. How is language used to elicit an automatic, unconsidered response? Start by looking for hackneyed phrases or cliches that are used as though they have meaning. Examples might be as simple as "a tragic accident" or "unbridled energy" or "blue as a robin's egg"--or they might be more complex, including euphemisms and language that serves as a stimulus in order to produce a reaction (rather than to convey meaning). Politicians and advertisers are notorious for this!
Once you start looking for examples, you'll find them everywhere.
When you have a pretty good collection of culturally scripted terms, choose one phrase to work with. Look for a cliche that maybe had fresh meaning at one time but now seems tired and meaningless to you. Write a piece--a poem, essay, or short story--that reinvests meaning in the cliche or trite phrase. For example, what would it mean to build castles in the air? In what way might a love be endless or priceless? What would someone look like who was proud as a peacock? See if you can put back into the image the energy that has been stripped from it through overuse.
This exercise should be fun--it's OK to exaggerate or get a bit silly. You're reclaiming an image from meaninglessness, so really make it yours!
Post your writing to the bulletin board. Give your post a descriptive title, and see what others do with other cliches.
In the next exercise, you’ll work on moving beyond the expected response in a given situation--to one that's truer to you.
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