Create a notebook or document dedicated to recording your dreams. To begin, write down as many dreams as you can remember from your life, then try to record your dreams daily as soon as you wake up. Use this repository as inspiration for a poem, story, or piece of art.
writing ideas
Writing Activity: Using Framing to Add Depth and Power
Emma McKinny’s story “Windsong,” is about going to a performance of Dr. Atomic, an opera by John Adams with libretto by Peter Sellers. Her father is the lead singer. You can use your research skills to get information on the actual performance and its reviews online, but here we want to focus on one element of the story–the way in which Emma frames her narrative. Framing is the subject of this writing project. The basic history you need to know is that the United States invented and tested the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico during World War II. The bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were developed in Los Alamos. These bombs ended the war with Japan, which surrendered after they were dropped. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of civilizations were killed by these weapons, whole sections of the two cities that were the victims of these bombs were obliterated. These bombs gave humans god-like powers which J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the lab, and the Doctor in the opera’s title, Dr. Atomic, understood. He quickly became concerned about the consequences of his invention. You also need to know that Los Alamos is visible from Santa Fe and this is especially true at night when its lights glow from the mountain ridge where it is located. “Windsong” takes place in the Santa Fe Opera House, a fabulous outdoor theater that sits under the distant gaze of Los Alamos, the place where the bomb-making that is the center of the opera’s story took place. The author goes through a huge emotional experience during the Opera performance. Those of you who attend operas, ballet, and traditional theater may have experienced these deep emotional moments. And then there is the clapping. And the lights go back up. And then you have to get up from your seat and make your way home, behaving normally, with this deeply emotional experience still inside you: “turmoil boiling in the pit of” ones stomach, as Emma puts it. To help the reader understand her experience, and express it herself, she gives her feeling and emotion to the wind which blows through the Santa Fe Opera house. She whispers to the wind the same good-luck phrase she had called out to her father in the beginning, thus transferring the art of the opera and the performers to nature. Let the wind howl, like a wolf, adding its voice to the power of theater. The Activity Write a story where an element at the beginning–a framing device–introduces a powerful idea into the story, that you can use to develop your story, and then return to at the end to convey even greater depth of meaning to it. To help you see how this can work, read “Windsong”. In “Windsong,” the phrase “in bocca al lupo,” introduces a series of related ideas about sound and the elements: it relates to the wind, a wolf’s howl, the power of art and performance, all of which carry through the whole story in various ways. When the author of the story comes back to that same phrase at the end, we all have a greater depth of understanding that allows us to read even more into it. When you plan your story, think about your key message and image, and think of a way you can introduce it as a framing device early on. Try to carry your framing device through your story, and then, as in “Windsong”, come back to it explicitly towards the end. By this stage, if you have woven the ideas into your story, your frame–and your story–will have great depth.
Writing Activity: challenging prejudice and developing empathy through storytelling
The story by 11-year-old Nate Sheehan, “Conrad and Fate” is about prejudice based on a student’s ethnicity. This story, set in the late 1950s is about prejudice against Japanese people, something that was very strong in in the United States during and some time after World War II, which ended in 1945. If you follow the news at all, then you know that today (in 2019) there is a big rise in prejudice in the United States and in other parts of the world. People trying to come to the United States for a safer and better life are being stopped at the Mexican border. People who get caught sneaking through are being put in prison. This includes children. Adults and children are being treated badly. And in our schools, and on our streets, there is increasing intolerance for people born in other countries, or whose parents were born in other countries, especially if their skin tone is not “white.” And also an increase in prejudice against people who are not Christians. It is very easy to write an essay that talks about why prejudice against others is bad. But essays rarely convince people. Fiction can be a more effective way of arguing for things you believe in. Empathy, the ability to share and imagine the feelings of others is one of the most powerful human emotions. Empathy is what makes it possible for a writer to create convincing fictional characters. Your job as an author highlighting how it feels to be discriminated against is to make your readers identify with the character so that they can imagine what it would be like for this to happen to them. The activity In this writing activity we want you to write a story from the viewpoint of a person who is thought of as “other,” like the Japanese boy in the story “Conrad and Fate” published in the January/February 2015 issue of Stone Soup. Write about what it feels like to have to fight for acceptance because of something you have no control over–your religion, where you were born, or where your parents were born, or because of the color of your skin. Perhaps you have had personal experiences of prejudice of these kinds–I have. It has been fifty-five years since I was in middle school and bent down to pick a penny up off the concrete in front of a classroom only to discover it was glued down, and that I was surrounded by a group of boys shouting “Jew!” and laughing. This memory is fresh, like it happened yesterday. Think about your own experiences and the feelings you had at the time, and try to imagine them happening to someone else. What does it feel like to be mocked, teased, excluded, or worse, because you are not seen as a person by other students? This is a story, so show us what it feels like.
