Today I took a personal day to get a new furnace, and had lunch with friends while the work was being perormed. As I waited for my companions to arrive, I noticed an article on How to Train for a Plane Crash. It inspired me to draft a poem (which I will not share because it is still too rough.) But it got me to thinking: Isn't every day training for a crash? Isn't just getting up each day an act of faith? And isn't it up to writers to explore and explain the daily act of living?
Here is an exercise for you.
If you are reading this blog, you are a reader as well as a writer. Writers read, so you'll enjoy this.
In my AP class, where I torture high school juniors with writing, writing and rewriing, I devised an exercise after beginning to read a wonderful book called Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. In the opening chapter, Daniel, whose father is a bookseller, discovers The Cemetary of Forgotten Books. While there, a book entitled The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax chooses him. Isn't that how readers become readers? Books choose us? I shared the first chapter of this novel with my class and challenged my students to either 1: write about the first time a book chose them, OR 2:write the first chapter of Julian Carax's The Shadow of the Wind.
Happy Writing.
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