Weekly Wednesday Writing Challenge

Hey Guys! 
This weeks challenge comes from the book Now Write! Fiction. If you have the book you can use that as a reference, it is on page 5-7. For those of you who do not have it, I am posting the challenge here. :) 

Through The Senses: Robert Olen Butler

This is a seven stage exercise. Do each stage separately! that is an extremely important note! Just make sure that you complete one stage before you move on to the next. Force yourself to write moment to moment through the senses only! don't worry about style or wording; just keep it flowing through your senses. Do not use any abstraction, generalization, summary, analysis or interpretation. Don't think just write! Make sure you write in the first person (you meaning your chaaracter). Now that I have given you a little bit of intro, here are each of the steps: 

Step One: You awake abruptly, though it isn't morning, and you are not in a bed. But you are in the place where you live. The room where you awake is right in objects and their associations. You are breathless and anxious from a dream you can't, and won't, remember. You look around the room, everything is shaped by an unspecified anxiety. Let's see the room, in the moment, through the senses. 

Step Two: One object in particular catches your attention and suggests a  strong connection to your anxiety. Move toward the object; touch it, experience it sensually.

Step Three: The object evokes a memory as vivid as a dream but not the one you woke from. It is a real memory, one based on wanting, desiring something. But this is a surface thing you want-- an object, a gesture a touch, whatever. Focus on the moment-to-moment, specific memory of desiring this thing, which nevertheless, carries an intimation deeper than yearning. But don't go to that deeper desire yet. Experience the surface thing through just your characters sensibility. 

Step Four: Now let the memory of this want include a moment when a secondary memory is evoked. This second memory involves another object, different from the one you are touching in the present but similar to it in its basic sensual pattern. This second memory surprises you. You deeply connect it to the first. And the wanting suddenly goes deeper, into a state of being, a state of self. Don't label it. Play it out in the moment through the senses. 

Step Five: In that second memory you are moved to an action driven by your yearning. Let the action happen moment by moment. 

Step Six: Some part of the action will bring you back to the present, to an awareness of the first object. Re-experience your object. Your sensual perception is altered, is reshaped by the emotion and yearning you have experienced in these two linked memories. 

Step Seven: Now, back in the present, in light of all this, you take an action. 




That is the exercise! It is possibly my absolute favorite! I used it to end up writing my short story Angel Wings. I will repost that in the Weekly Wednesday Writing. My story doesn't necessarily follow every step word for word, but it is a fiction exercise, be creative! Do not feel tied down by the specifics of the steps; just write! 

Happy Writings!