Round Robin: Four Tales
Madeleine Robins June 13th, 2007
Foreword to Four Tales
Kevin Murphy and I are in a writers’ group together, and, time permitting, we like to start the workshop with a writing exercise. It can be any number of things: write a scene from the point of view of a piece of furniture; write five opening sentences, choose the one you like best and write as much of a story as you can in the time allotted; choose three cards from a Tarot deck and see what sort of story they inspire in you. The writing exercise takes fifteen minutes–maybe twenty if we’re all really involved. And sometimes we decide to do a round robin writing exercise, which provides all sorts of good writerly nutritive benefit. Doing a round robin story makes you think about the threads of story and how they knit together; it makes you look at voice (even if you decide to ignore the voice you’ve been given); it forces you to make some decisions about someone else’s work. And when the final product is read aloud, there is often hilarity, and sometimes awe, at what has been wrought. To give you an idea of how this works, Kevin and I thought we would (with the permission of Christine Lorang and Jax Reid, who were also attending on the day this exercise was done) upload the four round robin stories that came out of the workshop this week, with the authors of each section of each story noted in brackets. See what you get from it. Continue Reading »