I teach a creative writing class from my home for high school students. Actually, it’s just winding down, but I enjoyed it very much and am considering offering it again. My philosophy with this class is to give my students the creative space they may not have in school or home to explore their voice as writers. In every class I introduce a couple of exercises that are designed to teach writers to seek out inspiration from the everyday. I thought I might try sharing one with you:
Photographs are wonderful tools for stories, because they have captured a moment in time and were taken for a reason. Find some photos or postcards. This exercise works best if you have no personal attachment to the photos themselves. Study the picture and write the story that you see. Alternatively, imagine you are the photographer. What prompted you to take this picture? What is the story behind the photograph? As the photographer, what is your story?
My novel, HOLDING MY BREATH, started from exactly this exercise. I was taking an all-day workshop on historical fiction at a book festival in Birmingham, England. The workshop leader handed out a pile of old photographs and told us to write what we see. I spied one of a girl standing by the pool side watching a group of young women lounging in the water. That exercise turned into a short story called “Holding My Breath Under Water”, which got published in the anthology Going The Distance, by Tindal Street Press. It later turned into one of the chapters of my book. So you never know where this kind of exercise might take you!
