Bonus Double-Post Wednesday: Place-Based Writing Exercises

I called it the Writing Blitzkrieg, which comes on the class period before the rough draft is due in my English 150 class. We've been talking about Mark Tredinnick's The Blue Plateau to complicate our ideas of how humans shape place and how place shapes humans, a conversation that has gotten consistently better as we get deeper into the book. They started out not liking it much, but once we got into talking about it, analyzing it both as readers and writers, they started to become more fond of it. I love it when that happens.

I've done this once before, where I've given them a zillion writing prompts in a very short amount of time and we've spent a maximum of five minutes on them, to give them as much exposure to different prompts as possible. It seemed to work well before, to jar them out of expected modes of thought, so I did it again.

Here are a bunch of the prompts I've used--and a disclaimer here: I got these prompts from somewhere a long time ago and I don't know where, so I'm unintentionally plagiarizing here. If anybody knows who these prompts belong to, please let me know and I'll give credit where it is due.

1. Write a little something that includes the following: the smell of fresh-baked bread, hot peaches, a man in a beret, the words souvenir, clink, and lurk.
2. Write about a time you either very very hot or extremely cold--and try to include something visual in every single sentence (a color, a description of an object, a metaphor). The idea behind this exercise is to combine two senses at the same time--the visual and the tactile.
3. In this exercise, list ten places. (Any place will do.) Then list a smell that comes to mind in each place. After you have those ten places and ten smells, circle the pair that you find most intriguing and start writing.
4. See #3, except do ten places, ten sounds.
5. With specific detail that appeals to all the senses, describe windy weather on a city street.
6. Imagine a body of water. Might be a lake or pond or river, anything. What do you see in your mind? Describe this body of water in detail--detail that addresses all the senses. What colors do you see? Lights and shadows? How does it feel on your skin? What is in it, near it? And in the last minute, write the feelings that this body of water evokes.

Happy Wednesday writing!