Fiction Exercise #3: I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone

Read "I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone" by Richard Brautigan. Then, look at the writing idea below.

 

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone

by Richard Brautigan

I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don’t look like any girl I’ve ever seen before.

I couldn’t say “Well she looks just like Jane Fonda, except that she’s got red hair, and her mouth is different and of course, she’s not a movie star…”

I couldn’t say that because you don’t look like Jane Fonda at all.

I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or 42, somewhere in there. I think I was seven, or eight, or six.

It was a movie about rural electrification, a perfect 1930’s New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids. The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn’t have any appliances like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn’t listen to the radio. They built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.

There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.

Then the movie showed electricity like a young Greek god, coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life. Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch, the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings. The farmer’s family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.

It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to the Star Spangled Banner, or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt, or hearing him on the radio “… the President of the United States… “

I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio….

And that’s how you look to me.

*******

In your Google Doc ("Fiction Exercises") or notebook...
Using a first-person narrator who is speaking or writing directly to someone ("you"), describe a person by comparing her/him to something unexpected, unusual, odd but also apt, revealing, suggestive. Allow the description of whatever the person is being compared to to take over the narrative so that the reader might forget that a person is being described. You might want to remind the "you" and the reader about the comparison at the end. Use heaps of sensory imagery, names, memories, concrete details, emotional details, etc. Use a tone and style that is suggests something about the narrator's relationship to the person being addressed and described ("you").

Or, you could create your own exercise based on the story. If you take this option just describe the exercise you've created in your Google Doc.

  

Fiction Exercise #2: Metamorphosis

In you "Fiction Exercises" Google Doc, write story that begins--like "The Metamorphosis" by Franz Kafka--with an improbable transformation:

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous bug.

 

But in your story you will write about the character you created in exercise #1. Your beginning might be something like, "After crossing Kenmore Square and descending into the Green Line T station, Cardinal Thrush suddenly felt that he was floating on air; he had in fact transformed from a powerful leader of the Catholic church into a small, brown sparrow."

Then, in a third-person story that treats the transformation as casually and dispassionately as possible (as if the situation were really not all that strange though the implications might be serious), explore the effect the change has on the character's life.

Fiction Exercise #1

Characters, setting, and situations.

In a Google Doc entitled "Fiction Exercises," write a description of a person whom you have seen and find intriguing but whom you do not know (or do not know well).

After you have described the person put the person into a situation with you. In this situation something should be at stake. For example, you might need something from the person or the person might need something from you. Write a scene in which the interaction between you and the person plays out.