Writing Exercises

I thought the exercises were really interesting and also challenging. Like Montana said, I think it started out confusing because we didn't really know what to do or what we should be thinking about, even though there was no real "right" way to do it. I didn't really know what to expect in the beginning and I really liked how my play on the first day evolved. Even though we just started writing it in class and continued a little more for homework, I realized there were so many different directions I could go in and I loved thinking about which story I wanted to tell. I don't know if I should continue developing it or not, but it was interesting to see how the nouns I used to describe myself led to what the set of the play consisted of, and how the two people who entered the stage ended up relating to each other. What starting out to be a broken up boyfriend and girlfriend ended up being a man and his therapist with a twist about where he is and why he's there. It was really weird how that was what my play turned into but I really liked how it came to that.

For two of the three days we had to write about what we were thinking or feeling at that moment. Even though this might seem simple, it was actually interesting to discover how I actually had to think about what I was thinking and think about what I was feeling at that moment. On the third day when we were watching the snow outside and we had to describe what we saw, heard, felt, and noticed, I realized I never really think about the sounds that I hear or the things that I see, I usually just hear and see them. With this exercise I actually took note of what was going on and how I was feeling and I found that really interesting.

I also loved the imaginative journey Ms. Connell took us on. I could only imagine how different each person's story became and I never did anything like it before. I found it hard to think of each object on the spot - what we were going back home to get, what the animal had in its teeth, what we had to take out of our backpack - even though maybe it should have come naturally.

Each exercise made me think of things I don't normally think about, for example naming nouns to describe ourselves, or even listing different kinds of trees (even though I think the point was to get our brains working and our pencils moving). These exercises made me look at different things about myself that I never really noticed before. One of the most challenging parts of the exercises was when we had to match the fairytale with the story we told. For some reason I found this to be so difficult, and I don't know if it was because I couldn't think of any fairytales to begin with, or if it was just difficult to find the similarities between my story and the fairytale. I was also not used to writing plays about witches and Thai iced tea and creating scenes from these random combinations was definitely an interesting challenge and something I'm not used to. The scene that we developed on the first day was more of what I'm used to, whereas it was hard for me to connect to these three scenes that were so different from what I usually write. I don't really know why that is, but I didn't feel as attached to the work as I did other times.

I thought it was really interesting how different stories, images, moments, feelings, and nouns that we listed all came together to make really interesting plays we would never think of otherwise. Writing down everything in silence and thinking of everything on the spot was both challenging and inspiring and really enabled me to discover unique stories.