Larry M. Coleman

This week, I’m lifting an exercise from Dr. Shelley Carson’s book Your Creative Brain and modifying it to fit in a writing context. Here’s the exercise as written in the book:

Turn your television on to a drama or comedy show. This can be a movie, a sitcom, or a soap opera. However, it has to be a movie or episode you’ve never seen before… [S]et the timer for five minutes and turn down the TV volume so that you can no longer hear the sound.

Now narrate the show out loud. Describe all the action, the emotions of the characters, and how the plot is progressing as it happens. Don’t stop talking until the timer sounds.

—from Your Creative Brain by Shelley Carson, Ph.D., page 255

I think this is an amazing idea, and it’s easy to see how to adapt this to writing. Instead of narrating out loud, narrate it by writing. Or (probably easier) narrate it out loud into a recorder so you can play it as many times as you need, then use that as a skeleton to write upon.

Does it seem unoriginal to write about something that’s already been created? Not really: there are several reasons this is a good idea. The exercise in the book says it’s to develop improvisation skills, and it will definitely be good for that. Writing is, at its most basic level, simply extended improvisation.

And, just as importantly, what you’re practicing here isn’t copying, it’s interpreting, especially if you’re doing it with the sound off. It’s a vital skill to have as a writer; after all, you can’t write about what you don’t observe, and this exercise forces you to observe and interpret at the same time.

Finally, you’re examining something that was good enough to get put out in the world. By forcing yourself to keep up with it and pick it apart, you might figure out what made it good in the first place. Even Picasso did this, although he did it with paintings. He spent years deconstructing and absorbing Manet (among others), making them part of him while also creating entirely original successor works. If he could devote a good chunk of his life to analyzing and riffing on his peers, then you can spend ten minutes.

Although the exercise leaves it up to you to pick what you want to watch and narrate, if you’re having trouble deciding, here are a few recommendations to get you started. They’re only a few minutes long, so you don’t even have to try to keep up for the full five. The first is from a movie that is probably one of the best to come out of the 1980s but is one of the lesser-known brilliant performances of the late Val Kilmer: Real Genius. You could try this exercise on almost any random place in the movie (simply go to YouTube and search for “Real Genius best scenes”), but here’s a good place to try:

If you want to continue doing this exercise in a short version, there are some music videos that would be perfect for this. You don’t even have to turn the sound down because they don’t have dialogue. One I’d recommend as a first attempt is “Berlin Lovers” by Still Corners because (as in many of their music videos) there is a very clear, easy-to-follow story going on:

A more advanced version is the video to Röyksopp’s “Only This Moment.” I think it’s one of the most brilliant music videos ever made. There is an obvious throughline cutting across it (a couple meets and grows old together), but there are several others going on at the same time. The video is less than four minutes long, but you could write an entire novella out of it if you tried, especially since it already has a very literary feel to it (I don’t know if the skywriting is an actual reference to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, but it seems like the kind of work that would have a literary allusion that sophisticated). Give it a watch and see if you can tackle it:

Even if these are the only three you try, you’ll find your writing improved and you’ll have a lot to write about. Enjoy!

This exercise was adapted with the permission of Dr. Shelley Carson. Visit her website here.