We begin with a gift: if i had a gift, what gift would i have. each actor created a gift for her/himself and for the other. in check in performance, the actor shared their gift, talked about what they are grateful for (see The Happiness Project http://www.happiness-project.com/) and then scored themselves from 1-10, or colours.

The Gift: what does it teach you about yourself? See below:

Reviewed by JoAnn Schwartz

After Performative Check In we grew our gifts by working in twos, threes, fours or fives, creating an improvisation around the gifts and adding an opening and closing line.  The actors thought of small sentences or phrases and then had the opportunity to choose two of these to top and tail their scene. they were able to add other dialogue if they wished.

Here are some images of the actors working on the floor:

sometimes around about images make us think more, so i am not adjusting…

everyone had the chance to perform, to experience ‘collage acting’ which is what ImpulseTraining is based on…

‘Rules for Acting’ by Zen Zen Zo’s Stomping Ground actors:

Today we explored curiosity and impulse as we created a list of qualities that watchable actors have, things like:

• humour,
• looking into your audience’s eyes (open heartedness) and welcoming our audience
• calmness and stillness (where appropriate),
• lightness of touch (not taking yourself too seriously)
• deliberateness of movement (where appropriate)
• use of poetry and metaphor and visual imagery
• presence
• openness
• working intentionally and at the same time allowing impulse to take us into the unknown
• strength of the voice by engaging the breath, breathing into the whole body
• confidence in our work (no sense of apology)
• being aware of context
• going with the unknown, and discovering together
• vulnerability and honest
• restraint (when required)
• simplicity
• clarity of voice
• setting up your scene before you begin
• emotional honesty

We moved on the floor with curiosity, with awareness, surprising ourselves.we are adventurers, explorers, scientists, discovering something unknown.

We constantly sit in the unknown, which can be a very uncomfortable place to sit.For us to understand the ‘known’ we need perhaps to understand the ‘unknown’.

Impulsetraining helps us find comfort in not knowing.

Some of the goals that the actors had both day one and day two were:

1. i want to learn, to open to experience, to support, and to improve myself both as actor and person
2. i struggle to say
3. i want a new experience
4. i want to feel like an artist
5. i want to wed spiritual practice with artistic practice
6. i want to be brave
7. i want to help and nurture people
8. i want to stop judging myself
9. i want to believe that i am perfect just the way i am
10. i want to rest…it is a speedy world. i feel a bit empty
11. i want to learn
12. i want clarity, stillness, openness, relaxation…i am angy that i am so anxious and i judge my impulse
13. i am here to learn. to play.  "I am a rope slowly unwinding
14. i want to open up my practice
15. i want to be nicer to myself
16. i want to be more confident
17. i am lost
18. i am a vessel
19. i want to deepen my spiritual work
20. i want to be more open more often. i want to connect more
21. where am i going? i want to find my own way of creating
22. i am impulsive. i am nervous i am tired
23. i am wanting to be open. i am shut down at the moment. i have dark spaces in my life
24. i have no where else to be
25. how to be articulately open? uncomfortable? good!  without apology
26. i want to feel free
27. i think i want to be more grounded
28. i want a greater sense of sitting comfortably.
29. i want confidence in the power of the performer
30. i want to improve my skills
31. i want to connect with myself to understand more deeply
32. i want to start the journey home…to understand and acknowledge the internal stuff, and accept and acknowledge what i feel
33. i want to push boundaries
34. i want to enhance my understanding
35. i want to own my own body
36. i want to be ‘more ready’
37. i want to be a better performer with a free mind and from self judgement
38. i want to be a 9.
39. i want to play with different methods
40. i want to feel my feet on the ground
41. i want to deepen my craft and love of spirit
42. i want to share what i have as an artist…and not to over analyze
43. i like the idea of relational being
44. i have tension in my heart, which is stopping me dropping instincts

Today was the beginning of ImpulseTraining for actors with the Zen Zen Zo actors participating in Stomping Ground. A great group of actors-in-training along with some longterm Zen Zen Zoers.  I left refreshed after an alive and creative day.  We worked in two groups, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  We did roughly the same work both sessions but different enough to keep everyone engaged (including the facilitator).

We used our own writing as stimuli, using the Split Britches (http://www.nyu.edu/classes/jeffreys/GayandLesbianPerformance/suellentrop/splitbritches.html) exercise beginning with "What i really want to say is…"  No other guidelines.  The actors wrote what they wanted to say and then shared it with the group in Check In.  The other group’s stimuli was the Margaret Wild’s and Ron Brook’s book "Fox" with themes of friendship, safety and betrayal…

We covered several areas of practice: The Basic Elements of Movement, taught to me by Gerrard Sibbritt, former dancer of Australian Ballet.  We looked at Locomotive movement and axial movement.

We allowed our impulse to move us, rather than us moving our bodies.  We talked about Deborah Hay’s Perceptual Practice (http://www.deborahhay.com/Notes_Intro_MBTB.html) and how she talks about the ten trillion cells in our body being alive and firing.  We dreamed this on with two scientists in the class, who talked about the trillions of microbes that inhabit our body and suddenly we all felt so huge, far bigger than how tall we are…so it is microbes and cells and impulse and connectedness. it is the richness of the space between.  we are relational beings and so our training reflects this (read Ken Gergen’s Relational Being. Here is what Amazon says about Relational Being by Ken Gergen:

How fast the year goes…two weeks…contemplating the coming year. What is it that needs to happen? How detailed do my dreams need to be? My way is creating collages, one, two or three, comparing, contrasting…and seeing what resonates.  I did a collage yesterday and the words "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, anywhere you want it to go" suggest to me enormous freedom…and "every possibility"…again, freedom, choice…lots of colour, cups of tea, plates with designs, flowers and a garden house.

As you create your library of collages, keep them and consider them each week…see what happens…

• Matboard
• Foamcore
• Canvas
• Wood
• Cardstock or other heavyweight paper
• Watercolor paper
• Cigar boxes
• Shipping Tags
• Papier mache boxes, trinkets, ornaments, etc.

• Clip art
• Vintage photographs
• Sheet music
• Magazine clippings
• Mulberry paper, washi paper, scrapbooking papers
• Labels (from cans, matchbooks, cigars, etc)
• Old letters and documents
• Discarded textbooks
• Maps
• Wallpaper
• Acetate
• Scrap fabric

• Buttons
• Old jewelry components
• Game pieces
• Keys
• Beads
• Ribbon and fibers
• Feathers
• Scrapbooking chalk
• Rubber stamps and inks
  

   

• Acrylic paint
• Pastels
• Colored pencils

Writing:

If collage is not your way, then try morning pages, talked about by Brenda Ueland ( www.librarything.com/author/uelandbrenda) and Julia Cameron (http://www.artistswayatwork.com/) and (http://us.penguingroup.com/static/pages/publishersoffice/screeningroom/0909/tarchertalks/julia_cameron.html#vmix_media_id=6102633).

Here are some other books that may be useful if this is the direction you want to head. I have worked with Natalie Goldberg and i like her work. Also Kate Greville has written a fabulous writing book called "The Writing Book"

(sourced from http://www.librarything.com/work/13461):

1. Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande
2. Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life by Natalie Goldberg
3. On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner
4. Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
5. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

6. The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes
7. The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life by Julia Cameron
8. Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft by Natalie Goldberg
9. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
10. Room to Write by Bonni Goldberg

It doesn’t matter where you start: the only thing that matters is where you finish. As Ezra Pound said, it doesn’t matter which leg of your table you make first, as long as it stands up in the end.
Once you’ve got something on the page, you have something to work on. Anything that prevents you getting those first words on the page has to be avoided. High expectations and thinking about the finished product rather than the task at hand can have a paralysing effect on those first words.
There’s a time to think about the story as a whole. There’s a time to ask yourself what your story is about, or what it means. There’s a time to demand the best of yourself. But the time to do those things is not at the beginning. At the beginning, the only thing that matters is to get some words, any words, on the paper.
Why is that so hard? Sometimes it’s because our minds are blank but sometimes it’s because our minds aren’t blank enough. Sometimes our minds are full of voices, whispering advice to us about how to write. They drown out the voice of our own mind which, at this stage, needs all the encouragement it can get.

This sounds easy. The problem is that starting at the beginning is just about the hardest place to start. The beginning of a piece of writing, as we all know, has to be irresistible. It has to grab the readers’ attention and then glue them to the page. Great beginnings look easy but they don’t come out of thin air; they come out of the whole story. Until the story is written, it’s often hard to write a great beginning for it.

Many writers work this way. They work out their ideas, write down a plan and then just flesh it all out on the paper. However, many writers can’t work this way because they don’t quite know what they want to say until they’ve said it. Both ways of writing work, so if you can’t work out what you want to say, don’t let that hold you back. Once you’ve written something - and the exercises at the end of this chapter will take care of that - you’ll have a better idea of what you want to say.

Some writers do, but other writers get to know them as they go along. If you can’t even think of any characters, let alone know them, you can still start to write.

Most writing ends up being grammatically correct because it’s easier for other people to read that way, but not all writing’s like that. In any case, when you first put pen to paper you’re the only one reading it, so feel free to do what you like. You can fix up the grammar later.

Some writing does, some writing doesn’t. Look at the examples from Shirley Hazzard and Gerald Murnane below. They both make you want to find out what happened next, although only the Hazzard piece has a highly ‘literary’ style. You might decide that your finished story should be written in an elaborate style using similes and metaphors and so on, but, unless that style comes naturally, don’t worry about it for your first draft. It can all be added later.

How interesting is it to have someone tell you the plot of a book they’ve just read? Not very. This means that plot alone isn’t what makes a book interesting. What makes it interesting isn’t what’s told but the way it’s told. In some of the best stories, almost nothing happens. See the example from Olga Masters, below.

This is good advice because writing seems to have more energy when it comes out of something the writer has experienced. However, it’s not very helpful advice if you don’t feel you know anything worth writing about. Some of the exercises at the end of the chapter invite you to write about what you know, but others invite you write in another way. When you do these exercises, you might find that you know something you didn’t know you knew.

‘Literature’ is a finished product. Once it’s finished, it is hard to imagine it wasn’t always as perfect as it is now. The literature we study by the great writers of the past is usually not their early work. Like the rest of us, they had to practise before they got it right, and when you look at their first drafts you realise that even they didn’t always know what they were doing. All that we now call ‘literature’ was once just writing, and all those writers we now call ‘great’ were once just people trying to write. If you want to learn to write well, you should read the work of those writers but it’s discouraging to compare your own work with theirs too soon. One day, you too may write ‘great literature’ but if you try to write it from day one, you’re more likely not to write at all.

Few serious writers wait for inspiration to strike; they find it better to make regular work habits and stick to them, even if they’re not in the mood. Some writers can work for eight or twelve hours at a stretch, others find that an our or two is all they can usefully do. Some writers have unlimited time, some have the restrictions of other jobs, households to run, children to look after. Some writers use word processors, some use typewriters, some use pens or pencils. Every writer works out a personal routine for working. Writing is one of the most individual things you’ll ever do, so you’ll gradually develop your own individual way of doing it. It doesn’t matter how or when you write, as long as you keep doing it.

If you live without distractions, this is good advice, but most of us are constantly distracted by other thoughts, worries, noises and sights. It may be impossible to eliminate distractions, but it’s often possible to use them. Find a way to put the distraction, whatever it is, into your fiction, and write about it.

My only advice to writers is this: don’t listen to the voices. Writers have to unlearn a lot before we are free to write. We have to unlearn a lot of the things we’ve learned, such as all the pieces of advice above. We have to unlearn, for a while, the desire to have a finished product. Getting a piece of writing to work usually means many failed attempts.
Hardest of all, we have to unlearn a lifetime’s training in being orderly and making sense. Writers have to end up making sense but they don’t have to start off making sense. In fact, a certain amount of apparent disorder is healthy in the early stages of writing. Why? Because being orderly is a process of eliminating things, and when you first start a piece of writing, it’s better to have far more material than you need and more ideas than can possibly fit into the piece. You need to have a great untidy overflow of characters, events, images and moods so that you can pick and choose, rather than having a poor thin little heap.
This takes practice. At first, it may feel self-indulgent, pointless and messy. This is alarming. Remind yourself of two things: first, that this is only an early draft, not the finished product; and second, that you are the only person reading this.
And try not to ask the most paralysing question of all: ‘but what is this all about?’

When we were thirteen, the coolest things to do were the things your parents wouldn’t let you do. Things like have sex, smoke cigarettes, nick off from school, go to the drive-in, take drugs, and go to the beach.

Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him, and it is this first death which we shall now witness.

- From Bliss, Peter Carey, p. 7
 

Notice something about them, though. As well as being openings, they are also summaries, which means they might have been written last, not first. The next two examples aren’t so much summaries as statements of the theme: moods and images that set the context for the rest of the book.

By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation. It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end. Whatever there was of fresh white paint sprang out from downs or dunes, or lacerated a roadside with a streak of fencing. This occurred shortly after midday on a summer Monday in the south of England. As late as the following morning, small paragraphs would even appear in newspapers having space to fill due to a hiatus in elections, fiendish crimes, and the Korean War - unroofed houses and stripped orchards being given in numbers and acreage; with only lastly, briefly, the mention of a body where a bridge was swept away.
That noon a man was walking slowly into a landscape under a branch of lightning. A frame of almost human expectancy defined this scene, which he entered from the left-hand corner. Every nerve - for even barns and wheelbarrows and things without tissue developed nerve in those moments - waited, fatalistic. Only he, kinetic, advanced against circumstances to a single destination.

It was the afternoon of the thunderstorm when A. finally decided to fall in love with Nola Pomeroy or try to shag her or do something special with her in some out-of-the-way place.
The clouds began piling up late in the morning. Storms in summer usually came from the south west, where the ocean lay. But this one appeared from an unlikely quarter. A. watched it almost from its beginnings through the north windows of the school. Its black bulk was bearing down on Sedgewick North from the plains far inland.
After lunch the sky over the school showed nothing but bulging clouds that tore away continually and drifted like smoke on turbulent currents. A. had just seen the first of the lightning when Mr Farrant told the seventh grade that their film strip on Major Mitchell was ready in the cloakroom and asked them what they were waiting for. They filed out through the door. Mr Farrant called after them: ‘You, A., turn the projector and read the text and send the wrigglers and gigglers back to me.’
The cloakroom was so dark that A. could not see who had gone into the lovers’ corner. But the darkness made the pictures more sharp and clear than any he had seen before. He showed the map of south-eastern Australia with a wide blankness over nearly all of Victoria. He went on turning the knob. Mitchell’s dotted line left the Murray River and thrust southwards. A.’s audience was unusually quiet and solemn. He supposed they were waiting for the first heavy drops of rain on the iron roof.

Each of these examples starts with an attention-grabbing sentence, then moves away to focus on the weather before homing in on an individual character. In this way, a link can be established right in the beginning between large impersonal movements - represented by the weather - and individual lives. Notice how we’re told some basic facts about where and when the story is set, but this rather dull though necessary information is embedded in much more dramatic material.

‘It’s today,’ the fat child said and rolled over in bed landed on her feet on the floor and held the window sill, looking back at her sister, the thin one who had been jerked awake. ‘Today!’ the fat one said. The thin one half raised herself on her elbows in bed. Her straight hair fell over her face. The fat one had curly hair in corkscrews over her head.

‘Should be the other way round,’ a visitor said once, looking at them with a stretched mouth and blank eyes.
The visitor meant that straight hair would have taken away from the fat one’s rounded look and curls might have made the thin one look rounder. The foster mother looked at them not bothering to stretch her mouth. The fat one and the thin one looked away not knowing how to apologize for being the way they were.
‘Go and play,’ the foster mother said, but they were already going. The fat one picked up a brush now and pressed it down her curls which sprang back in the wake of the bristles. When she put the brush down she saw in the mirror her hair was the same as before. The thin one screwed her body so that she could see the fat one’s reflection. ‘Are you?’ she said.

‘Am I what?’ the fat one answered.

‘You know.’ The thin one moved a foot which need not have belonged to her body so flat were the bed-clothes.

‘Yes!’ said the fat one, too loud and too sudden.

Tears came into the thin one’s eyes. ‘Don’t shout!’ she said.

The fat one picked up the brush and began to drag at her curls again. The thin one’s watery eyes met her sister’s in the mirror. They looked like portraits on a mantlepiece, the subjects photographed while the tension was still in their expression.

The foster mother came into the room then. She made the third portrait on the mantlepiece.
The thin one started to get out of bed rather quickly. Her ears were ready for the orders so she began to pull blankets off for the bedmaking.

But the foster mother said, ‘Leave that.’

The thin one didn’t know what to do then. She thrust a finger up her nose and screwed it round.

The foster mother covered her face with both hands. After a while she took them away showing a stretched mouth.
‘Now!’ she said quite brightly looking between them.

Now what? thought the fat one and the thin one.

Their mouths hung a little open.

The foster mother squeezed her eyes shut.

- From ‘The Home Girls’, Olga Masters, in The Home Girls, pp. 1-2
 

In the above story by Olga Masters, it’s fairly obvious from the start that nothing earth-shattering is going to take place. But the way the humble domestic details are set in a context of irony makes you want to read on.

This is the legend of Wendy Trull who was the prettiest girl in Tasmania between 1955 and, say, 1959. A long time to hold any title, particularly that of beauty queen.

When you see a beginning like that, you know that Wendy must either triumph over terrible odds and end up as the wife of a diplomat, or she must be doomed. Will Wendy be found at the bottom of the cliff, broken like a wax doll, with strange juices oozing out, and her ears in a paper bag, you wonder; or will she have a wedding in the Cathedral, and an ironing lady, and a second house at the beach, perhaps even a third in the mountains and a flat in London? And for the children a nanny who is more like a second mother to them than a servant. What is going to happen to Wendy?

Wendy lived with her mother and father and brother and sisters in a reasonably nice house with wide verandahs on Windmill Hill. The needles from the pine trees collected on the verandahs, and one of Wendy’s jobs was to sweep them up and put them in the incinerator. Wendy’s granny lived in a grim old terrace house in a poorer part of the town. She kept the brass doorknob on the front door gleaming, and in the passage, just inside the door, she kept a cow. You opened the door, and there, standing sadly on the pink and green lino, was a brown and white cow. Cows’ eyes look very big indeed when you see them up close in the narrow dimness of an entrance hall.

If there are motifs and links in the lives of people, then the presence of the cow in her granny’s passage can be related to the presence of a secret lover in Wendy’s attic. There were many years between the cow and the lover, but Buttercup, certainly an unusual pet, is somehow linked in Wendy’s life to the man in the attic.

- From Buttercup and Wendy, Carmel Bird, pp. 49-50
 

In the example above, there’s a beginning that teases us with the kind of attention-grabbing first sentence that traditional fiction uses, but before we can relax into the reading trance, it is broken. This beginning promises that it’s going to joke us along on two levels of meaning: one where we want to find out what happens to the characters and another where we’re looking at the mechanism of the story-telling process itself. The everyday and the fantastic are put in the same frame so that there’s leakage from one to the other: the beauty queen becomes strange and the cow in the hall becomes normal through this kind of two-layered vision.

It is not entirely an impersonal study of the process, though. Have a look at the way ‘you’ is used and imagine how much less intimate and engaging the piece would feel without it.

Here are three groups of exercises here, representing different techniques for getting started. Do some from each group because the aim at this point is to free your imagination and let it explore unknown paths. Think of these as nothing more than warm-up exercises and don’t judge them as pieces of writing. The more you’re surprised by what you find yourself writing, the better these exercises are working.

Many writers use some kind of improvisation as a way to start. Improvisations are a way of tapping into the unconscious mind rather than the controlled conscious level. Improvisations can help you remember forgotten moments of the past and let you think thoughts that might have been censored or ridiculed into silence. Improvisations are likely to be your own ideas and your own natural language rather than second-hand thoughts and language borrowed from other books or TV.
In the course of writing an improvisation, you’re likely to write about what you’re really interested in and what you’re really thinking about. This will help to answer the question: ‘What should I write about?’
To get in the mood, start with a completely unstructured improvisation:

Write for 60 seconds without stopping. Just write exactly what comes into your head, even if it’s only ‘I can’t think of anything to write this is a stupid thing to do.’ Don’t write in proper sentences or proper punctuation unless it comes out that way.

If you think you can’t do this because there’s not a single thought in your head, sit for 60 seconds with a completely blank mind. Not a single thought, not even about how hard the chair is or how much you’d like lunch. Is it possible?
Here’s another kind of improvisation, one that gives you a starting point:

Self-Portrait: write about yourself as you are at this moment, using all five senses. What are you seeing? How does it look, how much of it can you see, what colours are there, what kind and quality of light is there? What are you hearing? Is it a constant noise, what causes it, what else might cause it? Is there another noise behind it that you only hear if you listen especially for it? Are any of these sounds like other sounds, do they remind you of anything else, do they make you feel a certain way? What are you touching, is it smooth, hard, cold? What else does it feel like? Do different parts of your body feel different things? Are you comfortable? What would make you more or less comfortable? How are you sitting or standing? What mood does this posture indicate? What are you smelling? Are you tasting anything? Can you imagine a taste? What would you like to be tasting? Can you describe that taste? If something distracts you from writing, write about this distraction.

Those improvisations were about the here-and-now but you can also improvise about the past. Which bit of the past? See what you start writing about when you do the following exercise:

Write the words ‘I remember’ at the top of a piece of paper and then see what comes out.
Write the words ‘Yesterday, I’ at the top of a piece of paper and see what you find yourself writing next.

Improvisations don’t have to use your own experiences as a starting point. Words and objects can get you started just as well.

Write one of the following words and phrases at the top of a page and then write for 60 seconds. Write whatever comes into your head about the word: something it reminds you of, someone you think of when you hear the word, an emotion it makes you feel. Mushrooms. Gorgeous. Telephone. Shout. Fur. Never. You wouldn’t have thought . . . She wasn’t a . . . lying face down . . .
Or take an object - either one you can see or one in your mind - and do the same thing. The object might be a stone, a leaf, a car, a photo, a painting, a garbage bin or anything else.

Improvisation is all about hearing the voice of the unconscious, which we don’t normally hear. One place we do hear it, though, is in our dreams which, for that reason, are often good starting points for writing.

Write about a dream you had recently, even if you can only remember scraps of it. Now look at the scraps: do any of them make you think of something else? Is there anything in waking life that they make you think of? What is the mood of the dream? Use the scraps as the starting point for an improvisation.

Some people write down their dreams regularly, often as part of a journal. This is a good idea for writers: a journal can be a grab-bag of anything at all that you notice or think. You can note down dreams and events from life and also jokes you’ve heard, slips of the tongue, misprints, signs and ads that you’ve noticed, things that you found interesting or puzzling in books or films, descriptions of people or animals or places, emotions you’ve felt and their causes, ideas you’ve had. Your journal is just for you, so you can write it in any way you like and anything at all can go into it. You don’t have to write in it every day, though the more you start doing it, the more intriguing things you’ll start noticing. Once you have a journal, you can use a phrase or an idea from it as the basis for an improvisation, and later on you can ransack it for settings, characters and so on.
There’s a point where improvisation is almost exactly the same as the process of writing fiction. Here’s an exercise where they come very close:

Without trying to think of a story, describe a character: male or female, their age, race, occupation, physical appearance and mood at this moment. Where is this character: city, country; inside, outside; rich, poor surroundings; cold, hot environment; alone or with others?
Now describe the same things about another character. The second character needn’t have anything to do with the first. Then, connect these two characters. Do they already know each other? If they don’t, is there a way in which they meet each other? If they already know each other, are they related by love, hate, accident or physical proximity? Is there a significant object which is important to the characters? Does one of the five senses predominate? What is the overall mood: menacing, domestic, meditative, etc?
Write a page in which these two characters interact.

If you’re finding it hard to think of characters, start by improvising a setting and then add the characters later, like this:

Describe a place, a room or a landscape or some other kind of environment. What’s the time of day, the weather, are we in the city or the country, are we inside or outside, is it hot or cold, is it a pleasant place or not, what can be heard, seen or smelled? Now some person enters this scene: furtively, violently, casually, accidentally?

Group 2 - Using someone else’s story

This is a kind of improvisation, too, but you’re improvising on a tune someone else has already written. That means you don’t have to worry about structure: that’s already there. You don’t have to worry about plot: that’s already there. You can concentrate on bringing your own voice to the story and focusing on what it is that you find interesting about it.
You might worry that if you’re using other people’s work or copying them, you’ll never be able to write in your own way. Don’t worry about that yet: if you’re still copying another writer in your tenth draft, then worry. Try, though, to borrow from various writers, with different styles and voices, so that you don’t get locked into one way of doing it.

Re-tell a story from somewhere: a newspaper story, a myth, a fairy-story, a joke, a story your mother told you.
Ask yourself, why have I chosen this particular story to use rather than another? Is it to do with the events? Or is it the people in it? Is it something I don’t understand about the story that makes me want to re-tell it? Is it similar to something I’ve experienced myself? If it’s sad, what exactly makes it sad? If it’s funny, what exactly makes it funny? If it’s sad, what would you have to do to it to make it funny? If it’s funny, what would you have to do to make it tragic?
The answers to these questions might suggest another way of telling the story that is further from the original: more your own invention and less the story you’ve borrowed. Re-tell it again, making use of the answers to the above questions.

Sometimes it’s not the plot of someone else’s story that draws you to that piece of writing, but the actual words the writer’s used or a mood that the original has created. It’s often hard to say just how it has been done but you might be able to borrow a voice you like by doing this:

Choose a piece of writing you like. Use the first sentence as the opening for a piece you write yourself; or take the fast sentence of the piece of writing and use it to conclude your piece. Another way is to look through the piece of writing until you come to a phrase or sentence that particularly takes your attention. Improvise a page of writing, using this phrase or sentence in any way you like.

There is some magic about the rhythm of sentences, the way the words are put together, that can make a piece of writing very powerful and musical. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t borrow some of that magic.

Take a couple of sentences that you like from another story. Now, leaving the structure of each sentence exactly the same, replace the words with words of your own.

Here’s an exercise for those who relish chaos:

Take a few pages of some writing that you like. Cut the pages up into phrases or words, put all the bits into a box and then pull them out and stick them together at random. You’ll have a lot of nonsense and you’ll also have a few suggestive, odd connections: ways of putting words together that you’d never have thought of otherwise. Take some of these connections and use them as the basis for an improvisation.

This next exercise doesn’t just borrow from someone else’s story but from someone else’s life.

Eavesdrop on a conversation: on a bus, at a party, in the street, or even one end of a phone conversation. Write down what you can remember of it, then use it as the basis for a page of writing. Ask these sorts of questions to get going: what are these characters like? What sort of life histories do they have? Do they like each other, fear each other, despise each other, are they about to fall in love? What are they doing while they talk? Where are they? What are they about to do next?

Group 3 - Word games

These exercises are at the other end of the spectrum from the first ones which were improvisations based on yourself. These ones take as their starting point something quite impersonal: games with words.
No one expects great literature or anything very profound to come out of word games so they’re a good way of writing in an unselfconscious way. Word games are an excellent way of jerking the mind out of its usual groove. In these exercises, the rules of the game force you to put words together and create meanings in ways you may never think of otherwise. Sometimes there’s no meaning and that’s useful, too, because it’s a reminder that words are just artificial games themselves which only mean something because we’ve all agreed that they should.
Some of these might sound silly. But try them: you might be surprised at what you find yourself writing.

- Take a sentence at least ten words long, from anywhere. Then use each word in the sentence as the first word of a new sentence.

4change studio reopens next week from January 16, 2012 Metro Arts 109 Edward Street Brisbane 4000

Margi has returned to Metro Arts for 2012.  Early evening and afternoon sessions are available.  If you need to re-story things in  your life that you want differently this year; if you want to create space for new adventures to begin; if you feel you have fallen asleep and want a more vibrant and alive 2012, then please make a phone call or send an email.

Margi Brown Ash 4change@iinet.net.au  0410515637

Image above: from the MONA exhibition in Hobart, Tasmania.

This week I am researching acting training, a usual venture each year, awakening and alerting me to the old and the new in training the artist.  How best to train the actor?

I read many books, the one i have in my hand right now is Anne Bogart Viewpoints, edited by Michael Bigelow Dixon and Joel A. Smith (1995) Published by Smith and Kraus, Inc.

Page 7, and there is a quote from James Baldwin who writes:  "The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers" and there is deep resonance: the ‘knowing’ vs the ‘unknowing’…the less we know when we are standing on the rehearsal room floor, the more open we are to what is present, the space between, and the gifts on offer from your fellow actors, designer, director etc.

Anne Bogart believes, as do I,  that one of our functions as theatre makers is to remind our audiences of the important issues of the day. But not just that.  To awaken our audiences to the remarkable miracles of life.   Our job as artists is to awaken our audiences, and this can only happen we we ourselves awaken. And what does that require? Mindfulness, awareness and presence.

So that is the prime focus of 4change coaching this year: mindfulness. awake awake for there is knocking at the gate…

Collage is a very simple process, where you can ‘rip and stick’ images that you are attracted to. I like to remain in the unknown as long as possible, so i do not prepare a theme, or deliberately choose an image, especially whe i am seeking answers. I open a magazine, with great jazz playing, scented candle, hot cup of exquisite tea…and i’m off…here is a collage made by Michaela Ash.  Give it a go, see what you can come up with. don’t judge it, just look at it. allow the information come to you. pin it up in a place you see often, so that you can enjoy the gentle messages your unknown is trying to tell you…