In-class exercises

I started out the course writing contemporary plays with boring teenagers as the main characters, so what I've found most beneficial about these exercises were that they made me think outside the box. That sounds cliché but it's true: I started out writing about a boy having a stupid conversation with his parents to writing about a woman transported to the center of the earth by a bolt of lightning, who knew? The exercises that gave me the best results were the ones where I got the most specific direction: for example, the prompt about a character seeing the last person they would ever want to see, and having the two talking about a common event, which started out with me ranting about a prom dress to talking about a rape. Another example was the play incorporating something our classmates wanted to see on stage, in which I showed live drug use. I felt like exercises that pushed me into the realm of fantasy, or silliness, or ridiculousness, definitely forced me to be more creative, which yielded much more interesting plays. I also got really good results from the assignments that required me to write the least while saying the most (the $100/word play, the play without words), because it made me value each word and stage direction, and also because I am generally a concise writer anyway (as shown by this post, haha). I found that the prompts where we got the least direction (the earlier ones, like the slideshow and the language plays) made me take the most from my life because I didn't really know what direction to go in.