::mslexia workshops::

Write on the Wild Side #19
a writing workshop with Margaret Wilkinson

THEME: GOD

INTRODUCTION

GOD CAN be considered the ultimate abstraction. A real challenge for any writer. In order to cope, we must find concrete images for emotional, cerebral, or spiritual concepts. In other words, avoid naked abstractions. Cover them up, right away, with the fig leaf of metaphor. Translate abstract ideas, thoughts, or feelings into something solid.

Some commandments
Don’t preach. Don’t express your ideas as ideas. Don’t emote. Don’t use overblown language. Don’t express your emotions as emotions. Instead, use solid images that stand for more abstract concepts (no matter how idiosyncratically, accidentally, or imperfectly).
One of my favourite writers, Anton Chekhov, gave the following advice to a student attempting to write about another tricky abstraction, beauty: ‘Cut out all those pages about beautiful moonlight. Show us the moon’s reflection in a piece of broken glass.’

This time I’ve been generous, or let’s say bountiful, and suggested a large number of exercises for both poetry and prose on the subject of God. As always, try and surprise yourself with images or metaphors that are fresh and have a random, unexpected, adventurous quality, rather than a carefully-constructed quality.

EXERCISES

Gods of small things

#1
List some things that are around you. Near and far.
My grandfather’s watch; A rose brick wall; An empty paper cup; A pair of uncomfortable shoes.

Choose one and elaborate. Write intensely about Grandfather’s watch, for example. Write about all the things it makes you think of, all the places and memories associated with it. Describe it too. Now use these images and expanded thoughts, the details and various responses you’ve created as raw material for developing your metaphor: God is my grandfather’s watch. In other words, throw together your ideas about God and your writing about Grandfather’s watch.

#2
List the sounds you can hear around you right now.
The swish of traffic; A pen scratching on paper; A drawer closing; The hum of a computer; A distant lift rising
God is the sound of a drawer
closing. Explain.

#3
Imagine God has an ordinary or unusual job: woodcutter, housewife, prison warden.

How would that affect the way He/She looks, acts, views the world; and how would it determine what this Supreme Being does all day?

#4
Describe God’s Shoes
Empty God’s Pockets

#5
What shape is God? Colour?
Let’s say you picked ‘round’ and ‘blue’. List things that are round (be inventive): a bowler hat; a barrel; a nest; a spy-hole; a cucumber slice. List things that are blue: a bruise; a blazer; a cold nose; lead; oysters. (List as many things as you can think of in both categories.) Now write a shape or colour poem about God using as many of the items on either the colour or the shape list as possible. Use one in every line. Or devote the poem to one or two strong comparisons. Remember, the poem is not about the fact that God is blue. It is about your feelings about God expressed in terms of blueness.

#6
God’s Day
In list form, itemise all the things you did yesterday:
Woke late. Got dressed (slowly).
Ate breakfast. Listened to radio.
Read newspaper. Skipped lunch.
Russian class. Shopping.
Cooked dinner. Took out dog.
Now imagine God doing those things.

#7
Imagine God engaged in a single activity
God climbing a flight of stairs.
God falling asleep at the pictures.
God ice skating.

#8
Imagine God in a familiar place:
Your bedroom. A café. On a bus.
Imagine God in conflict with this place. Or at peace in this place.

#9
Getting philosophical
What is the first thing God remembers?
What is God’s most secret thought?

#10
Recount an ordinary miracle from your own life based loosely on one of those famous New Testament wonders. Regard everyday life as miraculous. This could result in an extended piece of prose.
Walking on water
Feeding the five thousand
Healing the sick
Raising the dead

#11
Envision a contemporary god or goddess in human form who controls: weather; fertility; fire; the harvest; the grapes; the dead.

#12
An idea from drama.
Start with two contrasting characters and a door. Write about what happens between these characters. Change their status in relation to each other, making the first one like a god/goddess; then the other.

#13
Make an ordinary object into a god (powerful, worshipped, prayed to, sacrificed to): a dress; a loaf of bead; a hairbrush; a hammer; a nail.

#14
Write a prayer, a letter or a confession to one of the gods or goddesses described in the following excerpts from A Dictionary of World Mythology by Arthur Cotterell (Oxford Paperbacks).

Silvanus The Roman god of untilled land, an uncertain force in daily life. He had to be carefully propitiated when inroads were made into his domain.

Maat Egyptian goddess of truth who wore an ostrich feather… [which] was placed in one pan of the balance used for weighing the soul of a dead man.

Chalchihuitlicue The Aztec water
goddess, a personification of youthful beauty and ardour, Chalchihuitlicue was portrayed as a river from which grew a prickly pear tree laden with fruit which symbolized the human heart.