This week’s prompt: concept colours

A visit to the UCL Slade Word/Image Forum event this week triggered this week’s writing prompt.

Julia Vogl designed a piece called Preference, in which you progressed along a hopscotch style board making choices between two things or concepts - pen/pencil ; mittens/gloves, etc. ; and, finally, believer/non-believer. The board used the colour spectrum plus black and white, and reminded me of the apocryphal stories of library assistants rearranging libraries into size and colour order. It also reminded me of the topic map web displays we often use to chart semantic relationships.

Certainly, it felt right that the final choice, believer/non-believer should be black and white. It’s odd how some concepts have a definite colour that works for them, like red for anger and blue for the sea (when I worked at the Admiralty Library, we certainly bound our books in navy blue).

So, this week’s exercise is simple:

1. Pick 5 colours. Write them across the top of a piece of paper.

2. Underneath write as many concepts (abstract ideas) that you associate with each colour.

3. Draw a line.

4. Below the line, write as many concrete nouns that you associate with each colour.

5. Are the concrete nouns and abstract concepts related to each other? Choose 2-3 unlikely pairings and freewrite for five minutes.

Is the resulting draft realistic, surrealistic, or a mixture of the two? At the very least it should be metaphysical but rooted in some concrete imagery.

3 years ago  1 note

Last night I went to the preview of The Library of Babel / In and Out of Place, an exhibition at 176. The Library of Babel is a short story by Borges in which the library is used as a metaphor for the universe. The picture, taken through a glass globe in Happy Survivor by Tillman Kaiser. It literally flips the room upside down, allowing us to see it from a completely different lens. This week’s prompt is an attempt to root the metaphysical in something concrete. If you had to choose a metaphor for your personal universe, what would it be? Choose something solid and close to you and describe it in detail - Borges spends some time describing his library’s hexagonal rooms, corridors and shelving. If you chose a garden, you might describe the plants, or a gallery, you might describe the paintings and sculptures within it. Even if it’s something quite small in size, like a bell, describe the shape, and texture - are there any carvings on it? Spend 3 minutes free-writing your ideas. Now go through and pick out anything that seems surprising and fresh. Find three concrete objects that you’ve mentioned in your free-write. Make a list of attributes of these three things. Free-write for a further 3 minutes using the words in your list of attributes. How does your universe look now? Do the ideas in your last free-write relate to your universe as you expected, or have they turned it upside down? Take the freshest, most surprising images and incorporate them into your poem. This should give you a poem rooted in very concrete things but powered by your original, metaphysical thought about what your universe looks like - essentially the lens through which you view the world. PS It’s hardly a surprise, I’m sure, if I say that my universe, like Borges’ is a library, though mine is not full of hexagonal rooms, but is made of glass.

Last night I went to the preview of The Library of Babel / In and Out of Place, an exhibition at 176.

The Library of Babel is a short story by Borges in which the library is used as a metaphor for the universe.

The picture, taken through a glass globe in Happy Survivor by Tillman Kaiser. It literally flips the room upside down, allowing us to see it from a completely different lens.

This week’s prompt is an attempt to root the metaphysical in something concrete.

If you had to choose a metaphor for your personal universe, what would it be?

Choose something solid and close to you and describe it in detail - Borges spends some time describing his library’s hexagonal rooms, corridors and shelving. If you chose a garden, you might describe the plants, or a gallery, you might describe the paintings and sculptures within it. Even if it’s something quite small in size, like a bell, describe the shape, and texture - are there any carvings on it? Spend 3 minutes free-writing your ideas.

Now go through and pick out anything that seems surprising and fresh. Find three concrete objects that you’ve mentioned in your free-write. Make a list of attributes of these three things.

Free-write for a further 3 minutes using the words in your list of attributes.

How does your universe look now? Do the ideas in your last free-write relate to your universe as you expected, or have they turned it upside down?

Take the freshest, most surprising images and incorporate them into your poem. This should give you a poem rooted in very concrete things but powered by your original, metaphysical thought about what your universe looks like - essentially the lens through which you view the world.

PS It’s hardly a surprise, I’m sure, if I say that my universe, like Borges’ is a library, though mine is not full of hexagonal rooms, but is made of glass.

3 years ago  View high resolution

This week’s prompt: concept colours

A visit to the UCL Slade Word/Image Forum event this week triggered this week’s writing prompt.

Julia Vogl designed a piece called Preference, in which you progressed along a hopscotch style board making choices between two things or concepts - pen/pencil ; mittens/gloves, etc. ; and, finally, believer/non-believer. The board used the colour spectrum plus black and white, and reminded me of the apocryphal stories of library assistants rearranging libraries into size and colour order. It also reminded me of the topic map web displays we often use to chart semantic relationships.

Certainly, it felt right that the final choice, believer/non-believer should be black and white. It’s odd how some concepts have a definite colour that works for them, like red for anger and blue for the sea (when I worked at the Admiralty Library, we certainly bound our books in navy blue).

So, this week’s exercise is simple:

1. Pick 5 colours. Write them across the top of a piece of paper.

2. Underneath write as many concepts (abstract ideas) that you associate with each colour.

3. Draw a line.

4. Below the line, write as many concrete nouns that you associate with each colour.

5. Are the concrete nouns and abstract concepts related to each other? Choose 2-3 unlikely pairings and freewrite for five minutes.

Is the resulting draft realistic, surrealistic, or a mixture of the two? At the very least it should be metaphysical but rooted in some concrete imagery.

Last night I went to the preview of The Library of Babel / In and Out of Place, an exhibition at 176. The Library of Babel is a short story by Borges in which the library is used as a metaphor for the universe. The picture, taken through a glass globe in Happy Survivor by Tillman Kaiser. It literally flips the room upside down, allowing us to see it from a completely different lens. This week’s prompt is an attempt to root the metaphysical in something concrete. If you had to choose a metaphor for your personal universe, what would it be? Choose something solid and close to you and describe it in detail - Borges spends some time describing his library’s hexagonal rooms, corridors and shelving. If you chose a garden, you might describe the plants, or a gallery, you might describe the paintings and sculptures within it. Even if it’s something quite small in size, like a bell, describe the shape, and texture - are there any carvings on it? Spend 3 minutes free-writing your ideas. Now go through and pick out anything that seems surprising and fresh. Find three concrete objects that you’ve mentioned in your free-write. Make a list of attributes of these three things. Free-write for a further 3 minutes using the words in your list of attributes. How does your universe look now? Do the ideas in your last free-write relate to your universe as you expected, or have they turned it upside down? Take the freshest, most surprising images and incorporate them into your poem. This should give you a poem rooted in very concrete things but powered by your original, metaphysical thought about what your universe looks like - essentially the lens through which you view the world. PS It’s hardly a surprise, I’m sure, if I say that my universe, like Borges’ is a library, though mine is not full of hexagonal rooms, but is made of glass.

Last night I went to the preview of The Library of Babel / In and Out of Place, an exhibition at 176.

The Library of Babel is a short story by Borges in which the library is used as a metaphor for the universe.

The picture, taken through a glass globe in Happy Survivor by Tillman Kaiser. It literally flips the room upside down, allowing us to see it from a completely different lens.

This week’s prompt is an attempt to root the metaphysical in something concrete.

If you had to choose a metaphor for your personal universe, what would it be?

Choose something solid and close to you and describe it in detail - Borges spends some time describing his library’s hexagonal rooms, corridors and shelving. If you chose a garden, you might describe the plants, or a gallery, you might describe the paintings and sculptures within it. Even if it’s something quite small in size, like a bell, describe the shape, and texture - are there any carvings on it? Spend 3 minutes free-writing your ideas.

Now go through and pick out anything that seems surprising and fresh. Find three concrete objects that you’ve mentioned in your free-write. Make a list of attributes of these three things.

Free-write for a further 3 minutes using the words in your list of attributes.

How does your universe look now? Do the ideas in your last free-write relate to your universe as you expected, or have they turned it upside down?

Take the freshest, most surprising images and incorporate them into your poem. This should give you a poem rooted in very concrete things but powered by your original, metaphysical thought about what your universe looks like - essentially the lens through which you view the world.

PS It’s hardly a surprise, I’m sure, if I say that my universe, like Borges’ is a library, though mine is not full of hexagonal rooms, but is made of glass.

This week’s prompt: concept colours

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Writing exercises and prompts based on special collections and their websites.

Originally conceived as a workshop for Essex Poetry Festival 2008.

More background info here.

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