Hey guys: this came up in a couple of meetings with my group this week, and I thought it might be helpful for the group as a whole. If you’re looking for a fun way to start digging into your nonfiction — stranger studies, nonfiction shorts from last week, whatever you’ve got down on paper for the longer essays — some revision exercises are a great way to start looking at what you’ve written from a radically different perspective. Even if you don’t, in the end, end up going to the extremes that some of these exercises advocate, it came be a great way to break open a piece that’s feeling static. They’ll be helpful, I hope, as the semester continues too. Hope this helps, guys!
1. Cut one piece in half.
2. Put one piece of prose into line breaks.
3. Put one poem with line breaks into prose.
4. Take the ending of the piece, and make it the beginning — write it backwards.
5. Change the point of view.
6. Change the verb tense.
7. Cut off the beginning and the ending.
8. Change the form or structure of one piece.
9. Take scissors and physically cut up the parts of a piece, then rearrange.
10. Stitch two pieces together, finding the link or common thread.
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[...] one version of this and other revision exercises, check out the list on the Introduction to Creative Writing [...]