Prepared by: Florence Cardinal
Posted on: Sun, 21 Oct 2001
Reposted on: Sun, 6 Oct 2002
Imagine yourself standing in front of a
door. Describe the door. Now
open
it. Do you need a key? Do you knock, ring the bell, or just turn the
knob
and walk in? Or is there a knob?
Read the instructions carefully. Don't get
lost in excess wordage.
The door
and what you see need not be anything fantastic (although it can be if
you
so choose.) Make sure you take the time to fully visualize the door
before
you start writing.
Once you open the door, what do you see,
hear, smell? How about the
sense of
touch? What do you touch? Does anything touch you? The wind perhaps?
Describe it all so your readers can experience it along with you.
For this exercise, in 300 to 500 words,
write a few paragraphs
describing
the door and what's on the other side.
Florence Cardinal's wrap-up
Posted on: Sun, 28 Oct 2001
Unfortunately, many people got off on the
wrong foot with this
exercise,
and, if they described a doorway at all, it became lost in the midst of
other prose. Towards the end of the week, more people seemed to be
getting
the idea, but I'm hoping this exercise will be used again, or another
one
similar to it.
I think one of the things this exercise
demonstrated is the need to
read
instructions carefully. The instructions for this exercise, I thought,
were
fairly straight forward. I think the problem was that writers attempted
to
give us more than was asked for. In other words, you tried too hard,
made
the exercise far more difficult than it was intended to be. If this had
been, say, for a contest, many of the SUBS would have been
disqualified.
But, a sincere thanks to all of you for
your SUBS and CRITS. don't
let this
discourage you. I look forward to reading more from you in the next
exercise.
Flo
Florence Cardinal's wrap-up
Posted on: October 14, 2002
This is the second time we've run this
exercise, and, just like last
time,
it has produced some interesting stories, and, for the second time, the
majority of subbers didn't quite grasp the purpose of the exercise.
Most of
the subs took a very simple exercise and changed it into something
complex.
All that we wanted was first, a simple
description of a door. This
should
have appeared as the beginning of the exercise. Then, a simple
explanation
of what greeted you as you opened the door. This could have been made
up of
a couple of paragraphs or something as simple as:
I pushed the door open and saw nothing but
darkness.
We'll run this exercise again in the
future and maybe try to make
the
explanation a bit clearer.
Florence Cardinal
Web site created by
Rhéal Nadeau and
the administrators of the Internet Writing Workshop.
Modified by Gayle Surrette.