Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 18:40:23 EDT From: Just me and my altered ego Subject: EXERCISE: Once In Every Childhood... A quick, simple exercise that you can take as far as you like. Although I've written it for a story, you could also use it for poetic fodder. Enjoy, and keep those fingers moving... 1. Pick your emotion. flip a coin. and roll a die (okay, pick a number from one to six...) heads? your list is: 1. sadness 2. distress 3. relief 4. joy 5. hate 6. love tails? your list is: 1. fear 2. anticipation 3. anger 4. guilt 5. gratitude 6. pride 2. Remember. Remember. Rememb...is that record skipping again? Sometime when you were a child, you experienced this emotion. Remember that time. Roll back the years, let those wrinkles smooth away, and put yourself in those days of yore, with the laughing friends making you cry even harder over...or maybe the terror when you drove the neighbor's new gocart and the peddle stuck so you couldn't slow down...or what about the anger you felt when you saw that someone else was in your favorite seat on the bus? 3. Write it up. You can push the details around, maybe make the air from the drunk's mouth stink even worse than you really remember, or have Freddie's braces have these enormous spikes that tore into your lip...but make us feel the emotion. Make us jump in our seats, lean into the spin, call out her name as our favorite dog runs into the traffic and the truck hits... 4. Now. Take that same emotion and scene, but rewrite it so that your protagonist (or even the antagonist, doesn't matter) is experiencing it with perhaps slightly different (adult type) surroundings. Instead of the gocart whizzing around the vacant lot, maybe it's a militarized dunebuggy sliding around Las Vegas? Or what if the daughter of the police chief darts into traffic and is crushed? Write about what you know? You certainly know how you felt...don't you? Just remember. Stare into the little whirling bits on the screen and remember... hip no tink? (mbarker@mit.edu)