The Laboratory #2 with Stephen McClurg

In this episode, Stephen McClurg and I discuss the different ways we approached last month’s exercise rules, and then share our results. This month’s exercise is derived from a method used by Ben Nyberg in his book One Great Way to Write Short Stories. It’s been out of print for quite a while, but you might be able to find on via Abebooks.com. 

You can see our finished exercises here: http://jquinnmalott.com/page7/index.html

Stephen McClurg teaches and lives in Birmingham, Alabama. After winning the National Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Contest, he spent a week writing haiku for the Washington Post‘s blog. In the past he has published articles, essays, reviews, short stories, poems, and comics in newspapers, journals online and otherwise, and appeared in the anthologies You Ain’t No Dancer and Voices from a Safe Harbor. He has written and composed music for award-winning short films, art installations, and dance.

Exercise #2 Rules

1) Use a violent event from your life

2) Write about the event in first person

3) Rewrite it in third person.

4) Rewrite it again from the other person’s POV

Note on the rules: although this is take from a book on writing short stories, if you want to use the rules to write a poem, that’s cool too.