This latest writing exercise is a controversial one—so controversial, I’ve been afraid to write it up, afraid to offend people.  So, it’s been sitting in the cul de sac of my head—a rusty, tin can–for well over six months.  Sometimes I’ll kick it, hear its echo, wonder if I might come down with a case of tetanus.

Of course, this is the kind of stuff (the forbidden stuff) that gets my juices flowing.  So finally, after six months of cowering I have come to this not-so-new realization:  controversy is what writing is all about.  Therefore, in the interest of our Craft:  Ladies and gentlemen, I present (drumroll) the Bradley Manning Writing Exercise.

For those of you who have been living in the wilds of Alaska in a Unabomber Cabin, Bradley Manning is a figure of some controversy in these here United States.  A computer geek, who leaked some rather damaging information about the U.S. war effort, the nerdy, clean cut private released videos of airstrikes the Pentagon would rather the public not see; he distributed 250,000 diplomatic cables; he downloaded and let loose roughly 500,000 army reports.  All of this stuff was classified.  Not only was this information embarrassing—perhaps even compromising—but it also cast the armed forces in a bad light.  After all, how did a private get hold of this material?

Bradley Manning, it appears, was not a nefarious person; he was just some little guy who was incensed by a feeling of moral outrage (justified or not) that compelled him to do something that might very well lead to years in the stockade.  I do not necessarily condone Private Manning’s actions.  Neither can I be sure that I would have compromised our country’s national security for whatever reason–good or bad–but I do know this:  every story, especially a thriller, could get some help from a Bradley Manning type—a figure who might not prove central but sits pretty in a position to move the narrative further:  a conscientious objector, a cog in the wheel that puts a wrench in the machinery.

Always, a narrative is made better when some minor figure arises to block its, inevitable, sacred and everlastingly important conclusion. Sure, you get pissed at that character.  But that’s exactly what makes the story compelling.

Here is the first question in this two part exercise:  Have you thought about installing your own Bradley Manning in the narrative?  What information does this person hold?  How does this frustrate the higher-ups?  How does this embarrass your protagonist?

The second question is pretty superficial:  What does your Bradley Manning look like?  The United States has recently attempted to release information that changes the look of Bradley Manning.  We recently have learned first that he is gay; later still, we have learned that he is a cross dresser, that he joined the army to rid himself of this tendency.  This has a lot to do with the spin that our great government wants to put upon this turn of events.  And this element of real life has all the feeling of a spy thriller.

So, here is the task:  start with a short verbal sketch of your Bradley Manning—the public face; then finish with a vision of the private face:  demonic or angelic, stodgy or sultry, feeble or strong—these all will form the basis for a nuanced portrait of a figure that you will revile and love.  I think that if you do this, your story will begin to develop the kind of complication that will make for some good reading.  Let this dual portrait function as the compass for the meandering path that is your narrative!

I actually had the opportunity to meet one of today’s great writers–a woman who wrote a book about the kind of exercise I’m about to engage in.  I had dinner with Francine Prose, the acclaimed author of Reading like a Writer, right before I would introduce her to an audience of terrified students.  She’s a pretty imposing woman—tall and no-nonsensey.  “I never teach Creative Writing.  It would kill me.”  This upset everybody at the dinner table—all of us made our living that way—and endeared her to nobody but me.  “The only class I teach is a Reading Class.”  Reading is where writers learn.

The opening line is the DNA.  Its primary duty:  to grab you by the hairy nut sac.  Its secondary duty:  to transmit all the obsessions—thematic, linguistic, psychological—in as limited a space as possible.  Learning how to write an opening line entails learning how to read like a writer:  reading closely for detail.  It is actually kind of like being a detective—every word, every phrase, every stutter is ripe with meaning.

So today I’m going to dig out my magnifying glass and sleuth through a favorite line and then I’m going to give you a little exercise that will help you think more like a writer.  A lot of great writers have done something like this, so I suspect I’m not the first nor will I be the last to engage in this exercise.

To be able to read—even over-read—is at the heart of the art of writing.  My favorite opening line of all time is Nabokov’s:  “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.”   Humbert Humbert, the narrator, is a pedophile who marries a woman in order to seduce her luscious, sexy daughter.  Yet somehow, he remains entirely sympathetic, despite some terrible doings. His voice carries the narrative:  urgent, weedling, insistent.

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.”

Can you hear the crazy?  It’s the crazy of a highly ordered mind—the mind capable of rationalizing all sorts of bad behavior, like child molestation and abduction:  someone who can convince the reader that he is actually being manipulated by a young girl, instead of the other way around.  We see the crazy in the jumbled sentence, which appears to be both a run-on and a fragment.  But we also see a certain kind of system in the crazy, too.   Look at the way he organizes the repetition of “L” and “F” sounds.  Look at the way the light metaphor runs throughout, transforming into fire:  heat.  Look at the way he creates a series of parallel structures.  You need an organized mind to recreate parallel structures and metaphorical conceits.

There’s a sadness in these lines.  We know he desparately adores this Lolita.  We also know that he has lost her.  How?  Just in that one word, a proper name–“Lolita.”  Am I over-reading?  Well, Nabokov wrote his novels out on flashcards—shoeboxes and shoeboxes of flashcards.  Every line was made to be overread.  And I’m sure this is especially true of the opening line.

Mystery novels have to be intense that way.  There’s no flab.  I’m going to list a few selected by Amazon as the best of 2011.  Here’s the exercise:  pick one and see if you can guess what the novel is about in that one line.  When you get good, you should be able to read every first line and be able to instantly know what the novel is about.  But to start off, pick one really juicy line and see what it’s conveying to you.  Interpreting opening lines is like reading tea leaves!

1)        “The Bedroom is strange.  Unfamiliar.” Before I Go to Sleep, S.J. Watson.

2)        “Richard kept his head down.” Readme:  A Novel, Neal Stephenson

3)         “Some people said Danny Boy Lorca’s visions came from the mescal that had friend his brains, or the horse-quirt whipping he took around the ears when he served time on Sugar Land Farm, or the fact that he’d been a middleweight club fighter through a string of dust-blown sinkholes where the locals were given a chance to beat up what was called a tomato can, a fighter who leaked blood every place he was hit, in this case a rumdum Indian who ate his pain and never flinched when their opponents broke their hands on his face.”  James Lee Burke, Feast Day for Fools

4)                     “Harry Dunning graduated with flying colors.” 11/12/63:  A Novel, Stephen King

5)                     “Dear Tess, I’d do anything to be with you, right now, right this moment, so I could hold your hand, look at your face, listen to your voice.” Sister:  A Novel, Rosamund Lipton

6)                     “Oh, no, no, no, thought Clara Morrow as she walked toward the closed doors.”  A Trick of the Light, Louise Penny

7)                     “They throw him out when he falls off the barstool.” The Most Dangerous Thing, Laura Lippman

8)                     “You see the long, wide, perfectly straight strip of asphalt before you, the hangar to your right with the words GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS painted in billboard-size letters along the side.”  The Night Strangers, Chris Bohjalian

9)                     “Something has happened.”  Turn of the Mind, Alice LaPlante

10)                     “The Pentagon is the world’s largest office building, six and a half million square feet, thirty thousand people, more than seventeen miles of corridors, but it was built with just three street doors, each one of the opening into a guarded pedestrian lobby.”  An Affair, Lee Child

Every little boy—or girl—has a special trophy case: marbles, sea shells, buttons, rocks.  It’s an obsessive habit that reminds us of time and place, of history and chance.  That sea shell with the speckled markings that recall the waitress who flirted you up for an hour at the shore—it is something that will always remind you of the mole where you kissed her softly:  it is the souvenir of an older woman, a young boy and a lonesome pier.

Some people never let go of their collections.  They become hoarders—obsessive and rapacious.  They become collectors—connoisseurs of the fine and beautiful and expensive.  They become trophy hunters—proud and vain:  creatures derided by vanity.

I just read a New York Times article about cabinets of curiosity—they are going through a revival and a museum show–and it inspired me to retool an old assignment I used to give my Creative Writing kids:  my trophy assignment.  Of course, cabinets of curiosity are trophies and, also, not.  They are displays of possessions you are proud of—just like trophies—but the significance of these objects—these things–remains enigmatic; they are mysteries that need to be curated, explained and unraveled.

Every trophy says the same thing:  Behold This Great and Mighty Monument to My Amazingness.  It is a very public message—devoid of nuance.  My mom displays all my Piano Trophies on the little upright piano, still, beside my sister’s towering Beauty Pageant trophies; it is embarrassing because this grand display shouts her accomplishments with a megaphone to any and all who sit in her parlor.

Cabinets of Curiosity, though, are filled with beautiful, quiet secrets.  A piece of igneous rock; the dentifrice of a long-gone shark; a beautifully pleated Chinese fan—the multitudes inside a Cabinet of Curiosity speak of other voices, other rooms.  Cabinets of Curiosity—wunderkammer—were once the province of the uber-rich, those who could afford to finance explorers who brought back beautiful specimens as proof that there existed an eccentric world and that, yes, they had been to its edge.

By the Victorian era, Cabinets of Curiosity were delights, luxuries, that middle class people could afford—signs of worldliness and sophistication, signs of a flourishing colonial landscape.  If you didn’t have one, you didn’t have any class.  Perhaps that is why the opening of Bruce Chatwin’s amazing travel narrative In Patagonia begins with the young author contemplating a “piece of Brontosaurus” kept in his grandmother’s Cabinet of Curiosity.  This little artifact impels him on a journey and us, along with him:  Chatwin’s description reveals the intensity of a young boy feverishly wondering about that leathery piece of skin.

This exercise asks you simply to construct a Cabinet of Curiosity for any one of your characters.  In so doing, your character will have a history and a world; you will find that, if your character is alone, he will suddenly have friends, rivals and enemies; you may be surprised to find that your character will even develop a family tree.  You can write a saga if you do this exercise correctly.  Chatwin’s skin, for instance, is a wedding gift sent back by his grandmother’s brother–Charles Milward–during a period in the 19^th Century when that ancestor immigrates to South America; it is supposedly part of a larger prehistoric creature, a Mylodon, dug up in a cave by Chatwin’s great-uncle, that the family had in their possession; the wedding gift, it was lost in a move; all that remains is a dessicated piece of skin with red hairs dangling from it.  Chatwin’s return to Patagonia also not only allows him to recapture the landscape of this long lost great-uncle but, also, puts him face to face with history:  many Welshmen settled Patagonia, where they even to this day, live in splendid isolation…tending sheep.

All this in a piece of skin!  Remember that every object has a history—a set of relations; complications; loves and passions, regretted and cherished.  What things would your character put on display but, also, hide?  What talismans do they carry in the museum of the self?  These are important questions.  If you can’t answer them for your character now, this exercise will help you do that.  If you’re having trouble getting into it, ask yourself this:  what things do YOU display; what, in the act of producing spectacle conceals your own obscure, secret joy?

51  Writing Exercise:  What pattern is your wallpaper?

“Imagine that the world your character occupies is wallpaper,” said my writing instructor.  “Now, imagine what would happen if you broke that pattern.”  This was the exercise given by one of those life-changing profs so long ago—a man who entered into my little world when I was doing the normal, routine coursework of an undergrad well on his way to becoming a medical student:  Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics.

I never thought that I would ever become a writer.  David changed all that.  And this exercise—the one I will share with you today—was one of those amazing tasks that rocked my world.   It will allow you to think of several interrelated strands in a character’s arc:  past, future, present.

The wallpaper is an apt metaphor of humdrum regularity.  Every character has a routine—an arrangement, a pattern.  To be a good writer, it is important to understand that pattern.  I, for instance, wake up every morning and do five minutes of calisthenics.  I brew an extremely potent pot of coffee.  Then, I write for 3 hours.  I jog.  And finally, I eat lunch.  I know:  I’m boring.  I am ashamed that I am so boring.  This is my sad, monotonous pattern.

You, too, have a routine.  In fact, if you were being watched by a private dick—the sort that might appear in the kind of Detective story I’m currently writing—than you would see how absolutely predictable you are.  This routine is the story in stasis; it is the pattern that needs to be established in small details.  It doesn’t have to established before the action; it can be established after it.  But wherever it shows up, it has to be there.  And now that we have established the primacy of the wallpaper,  you must understand one key fact:  the wallpaper, it’s most definitely not the story itself.

This is probably the biggest problem for writers who are stuck at page two—they are writing the wallpaper.  The wallpaper is the anti-story.  And this is where many writers who can’t find a plot leave their narratives:  in the world of endless repetition.

To create the story, you must ask yourself how the wallpaper must be violated.  How can you introduce interesting variation?  This is the element that makes the story compelling and motivates the plot.  It can be as simple as a phone call; I could be interrupted in my writing by an urgent ring, informing me that my cat has been run over and this will send me on a quest for revenge.  Someone could knock on the door; it is a man, a bully, who demands that I stop playing my loud music and this will devolve into a Tarantino-esque shooting spree.  A fire alarm could go off in my building; I meet a beautiful woman, half naked outside the complex, and offer her my jacket…

So, here is the exercise:  figure out what your character’s routine is—that little ant-life that he is drudging through.  It doesn’t have to be as boring as mine—a writer’s sad, solitary, keyboard existence; it can be the life of a gigolo.  But even a gigolo’s life has wallpaper.  Figure out the wallpaper and you are well on your way to violating it.  Violate it and you have a plot.

Happy New Year!  It is the Year of the Snake!  Vietnamese people look at everything in terms of the animal zodiac.  You know:  you’ve seen it:  the zodiac is often printed on paper placemats at fine Chinese dining establishments everywhere.  In all there are twelve zodiac animals.  I am a pig:  a noble animal of unusual taste and distinction.

Wherever my parents travel, whatever foreign land they find themselves in, they buy their zodiac animals–horses and pigs carved out of numerous materials:  wood, iron, marble, crystal.  When they get home, they festoon the living room with little tableaus of pigs and horses, galloping and dancing with each other—always in pairs.  My mom is the pig; my dad, the horse.   These delightful creatures dance on lace doilies and foxtrot across the old upright piano and tango around the coffee table.   They hide among my trophies and pop up even in the bathroom hide-and-seeking among the bowl of dusty soaps that nobody is allowed to touch.  Gotta say:  this expression of love–it is touching and also extremely tacky.

Everybody in my family knows that, of course, my dad is the horse.  He is noble and even-tempered and forthright.  It makes sense that my mom is the pig; she is quixotic, given to flights of fancy and she’s got a temper.  I have a brother who is a snake but he kind of drifted away from the family.  Snakes are smart, financially secure, passionate but they are also jealous and suspicious.  This pretty much describes him to a T.  This also describes exactly why few people in our clan communicate with him anymore.

So, here is your writing exercise.  It’s about character development.  Create a character that corresponds with one of the Chinese Zodiac signs.  It can be any of them:  snake, monkey, dragon.  Whatever.  Here’s a link to get you going on this journey of discovery.

If you don’t want to create a character out of whole cloth, that’s okay.  Just pick a character you already have who may be giving you some trouble and try to figure out what their sign truly is.

This exercise will allow you to think about the through-line of your character—a problem that many people have, especially nowadays when art fiction tells you to create “fully rounded characters” that appear to almost be alive; flat characters, those based around a single idea, have fallen out of favor.  This means, often, that people don’t know what their characters are about.  They can’t get a handle of them because “real” people are vibrant and can never be contained and transcend the prison of categories.

But if you can’t focus on what your character is about, you will never be able to make the characters do things: react, conspire, love, revile.  And this, I think, is the failure of much student writing I’ve experience as a college level teacher of Creative Writing:  the students believe that their own characters are actual people without realizing that they’re only supposed to appear real:  they forget that the illusion is everything and that this illusion resides in the initial act of definition.

You don’t have to do this with the animal Zodiac.  If you find it too inaccessible, go ahead:  do it with the Greek zodiac.  It will yield the same results.

Happy New Year!  May only the best quality of the Snake find you!  May you get tons of writing done!

Khanh Ho is writing the first Vietnamese American Detective Fiction ever.  Why?  Because being the first is a power trip.   Like what you read? Share, comment, subscribe. 

I’ve taken dozens of writing seminars—some good, some bad. Over time, I’ve done hundreds of exercises. And in my capacity as a college level Creative Writing professor, I’ve had the chance to assign writing exercises, too. So, I know: the best exercises get you into the groove. This one—the one I’m about to share with you–is by far my absolute favorite. This one is a keeper.

I did it in my first writing seminar with this really cool writer—let’s call him David—who gave off the aura that every professional writer of high class art fiction should emit: denim shirts; denim jeans; old leather belt with real silver accents; longish unkempt hair, never parted; scuffed, leather attaché case with a discreet imprint from a luxurious maker; cowboy boots; crows feet around the eyes. Kinda cool to a college freshman.

David had us bring in one object and tell two stories about it: one true and one false. We could not reveal the true one. We could not even give clues by creating deliberately crazy stories that would indicate falsehood. We were just supposed to tell two variations of one story. One girl brought in a brick that she supposedly rescued from a lava flow in Hawaii. Me: I brought in a stuffed animal and spun a totally false story of shoplifting at Arnie’s Toyland.

After each story was told, the class voted and discussed why we thought one story was true or false. This made for a fun class. You got to know a lot about your classmates by listening to how their minds work. You also began to realize that certain elements are important to the feeling of truth: detail, character, setting. These are the elements that make a story ring with authenticity, even if it is a bald-faced lie.

To do this exercise at home, without the audience participation element, pick an object and try to write a scene around it. If you’re working on a story, go ahead: use the object in the scene. You don’t have to write two variations. You just have to decide that the object is going to have a life of its own—that it will reveal all sorts of connections about the world it occupies.

This exercise is perfect for the mystery writer, because it is essentially a realist exercise. Mysteries live in the world of realism; they deal with the everyday world. No Hobbits or Space Creatures or Wizards inhabit this world of pulp. No zombies or vampires or barbarian warlords. Mysteries exist in the plausible world of our mind. And all mysteries—all–are locked in the objects that we hold, like flies trapped in the spider web of our own making.

Did you like this? Make Khanh’s day:  Share on Facebook.  Tweet your friends.  Leave a comment.  Here’s a question to get you started:  What is your character’s prize possession?