Creative writing project: 3 Imagining

Figure of an Angel, about 1710. Museum no. A.6-1948

Figure of an Angel, gilded limewood, Austria, about 1710. Museum no. A.6-1948


Backgammon piece, 1150-75, Museum no. 376-1871

Backgammon piece, walrus ivory, Germany (Cologne), 1150-75, Museum no. 376-1871


'Florist's Basket' bag by Lulu Guinness, 1993, Museum no. T.128-1996

'Florist's Basket' bag by Lulu Guinness, satin and velvet, Great Britain, 1993, Museum no. T.128-1996

Our imaginations will take us anywhere we can conceive of: into the past or the future, to places we have never been to and places that have never existed. The possibilities are infinite.

In the case of a museum object or painting, we can choose to visit the time when it was made, and imagine who made it and why. We can imagine the things that might have happened to it over the course of time, who owned it, what it meant to them, what scenes took place around it.

Imagined worlds

We do not have to stay with the object. We can use it as a starting point from which to begin a journey through a whole imagined world.

If it is a piece of representational art, such as a painting or sculpture, we can focus on the people, creatures and scenes that it depicts. We can imagine what is going on just beyond the edges of the picture. We can imagine what was happening just before, or just after, the frozen moment that we see.

Where there are human figures depicted, we can imagine their histories, their thoughts, their futures. But there is no reason why we should stop with the human. What is the habitat and life-cycle of the griffin? What sort of thoughts does an angel have?

Trust your imagination
Let your imagination run wild. Trust its powers of endless invention. Don't know what it's like to be an angel? Just ask yourself. You'll quickly find out.

You will find, too, if you trust it that your imagination has an instinct for completing patterns: patterns of imagery, or the patterns of a complicated plot in a story or a play.

Care and feeding
However, the human imagination does not work in an airless vacuum, or create out of emptiness. It needs to be fed material from which to begin working. The material it needs is diverse: poetry, fiction and drama, art and music, philosophy and science, natural scenes and townscapes. And people: their thoughts, feelings, experiences, interactions with each other.

A good writer is normally a people-watcher. Also someone who takes in details: especially the telling details that give so much away. It may be a fleeting expression on someone's face; it may be their style of haircut, or their unlikely taste in music.

Most of all, we feed the imagination by attending carefully to what we see and hear, smell, taste and feel. What the imagination does with all this input can easily be something else again. When we study the wings of a parrot, we may be learning about the structure of an angel's wings, or a griffin's.

Notebooks
Many writers carry notebooks in which they write down everything that occurs to them that might come in useful for their work. Here are some of the sorts of things that writers often note down:

  • ideas for poems and/or stories
  • images (similes and metaphors)
  • descriptive notes
  • evocative words
  • observations on people's behaviour
  • scraps of overheard conversation
  • notes on characters
  • detailed observations of objects, scenes, people etc

Some writers prepare for work by doing a lot of research: historical, geographical, scientific, whatever they feel they need to know. Others are turned off by research and do little or none. It's up to you what you choose to do. Neither way is right or wrong. It depends on what best stimulates your imagination. In the end, the only thing that is important is the finished piece of writing.

Download Imagining (PDF file, 76 KB)

Go to Creative writing project: 4 Shaping

Exercises

Exercise 1: Portrait piece

Aim of the exercise: Getting to know your descriptive strengths as a writer
Begin by choosing a portrait: a picture, sculpture, or photograph of a person from the selection of portraits below, from the V&A galleries.

Decide whether you are going to write a poem or a short piece of prose. If you are writing a poem limit yourself to 40 lines or less. If you are writing prose, limit yourself to fewer than 1000 words. This word limit means that you have to aim to produce maximum impact with a small amount of text.

Write down the title of the portrait. This is going to be the title of your piece of writing.

You are going to write a piece in the first person: one in which the main character tells his or her story directly to the reader. So whether you are writing poetry or prose, your piece should begin 'I am' followed by the name of the person in the portrait.

If the person in the portrait is someone whose name is known, then your piece will begin in a way that is similar to this example: 'I am the dancer, Josephine Baker …'

If the name of the person in the portrait is not known, then you may end up with a beginning that is similar to this: 'I am the boy in blue …'

Whatever you write at this point will be conditioned by what you know about the person in the portrait.

Once you have your first line, forget your first person narrator for the moment. Write a set of notes about what you yourself see in the portrait.

Ask yourself:

  • What details you notice first and second?
  • What do you notice about the person's clothes?
  • What do you notice about their face and expression?
  • How old are they?
  • What social class do they come from?
  • Has their life been hard or easy?
  • How tall are they?
In addition, write down details about colours, textures, and, if appropriate, the way the light falls in the picture.

Think about what these details tell you about the person depicted. Make your notes as detailed as possible.

You should now have:

  • your title
  • an opening line or sentence
  • a set of detailed notes about the picture that you can use as the basis for a first person narrative

Write down the following closing line: 'How much of me do you really see?'

The next step
If you are in a V&A gallery, leave it for now and go and work elsewhere. The garden is a pleasant place to sit. Or you might feel like a drink in one of the cafés. Otherwise, you can find a corner in one of the quieter galleries: Ceramics is often peaceful, and you can sit on one of the portable gallery chairs.

If you are working from the website, take your notes away from the computer. Preferably switch it off for a while or go into another room.

The idea of this exercise is that you use the notes you have (plus title and opening and closing lines) to write either a short poem or very short, short story, in the first person, without constantly referring to the portrait.

When you have written a first draft of your first person poem or story (using the notes you made) go back to the portrait in the gallery or on the website. Look at it then re-read your draft. Look back at the portrait and re-read your draft a second time. Then ask yourself the following questions:

  • How well did your piece of writing capture the portrait? Are you pleased with it as a whole piece, or only with some passages of it?
  • What elements of the portrait did it convey well?
  • What aspects of the portrait did it miss?
  • Did writing notes as yourself and then turning these into a first person narrative give you a sense of two separate ways 'in' to the portrait?
  • What was the effect of already having your first and last lines? Would you alter these if you wrote the piece out again?
  • What was your best line or sentence, and why? (Ask yourself, if you could only keep one line or sentence, which would it be, and why?)
  • What would you do differently should you do the exercise again?
  • Were your notes good? What should you have noted more thoroughly?
  • Did you end up with a piece of work that was a description of what is shown in the portrait? Or did you use the portrait as a leaping off point for something more imaginative?

Because you work without having the portrait in front of you, relying instead on the notes you have made, this exercise tells you something about what you see when you look at a piece of art, and how you can make other people see what you see.

Remember, when reading a poem or story inspired by a picture, sculpture or similar artwork, the reader doesn't usually have a copy of this in front of them. It's up to the writer to convey the feeling of the picture or artwork to the reader.

The next two exercises move on from and build on this one.

Download Exercise 1: Portrait piece (PDF file, 85 KB)


Exercise 2: Outside the frame

Aim of the exercise: To develop an awareness of character and setting
This exercise involves looking at a portrait and then imagining the things it doesn't tell us.

Look again at your notes for the Portrait piece exercise. Did you write down anything that wasn't in the portrait? For example:

  • Did you imagine what the person smelled like?
  • Did you give them an occupation?
  • Did you imagine what they were thinking? (At some level, most portraits lead their viewers to do this)

Choose a portrait from the selection below that is different from the one that you chose for the Portrait piece exercise.

If you chose an anonymous portrait for the first exercise, then consider choosing one with a named sitter for this exercise and vice versa. Making notes as fast as you can, jot down your responses to the following suggestions and questions:

Without using the portrait's actual title, give the person you are looking at a name, age, occupation, and place of residence. You might also want to give them a date. Here is an (invented) example: 'Jan is a farmer, he is forty-six years old, and this is not a bad age to have reached for someone living in the year thirteen-sixty-two.'

What does the person smell of? Is it one predominant scent, or a mixture of scents? Be as subtle as you can. For example, a single scent description ('Jan smelled of the cowshed') might be less effective than a mixed one like this: 'Jan's scent was a thick mixture of cow dung, parsley, and apples, with an odd, underlying aroma of lime that you couldn't get out of your nostrils.'

Look at the setting for the portrait. What do you think is going on just outside the frame of the picture? What is the person in the picture looking at? What are they hearing? If the portrait is a sculpture, imagine the sitter in a suitable setting.

Hearing and scent add two important sensory dimensions to a description. They also, again, add elements that the portrait itself doesn't possess. Vision, what the person in the portrait is seeing, adds a further new dimension.

Another dimension comes when you combine the sensory elements above with a sense of what the person is thinking. Are they thinking about having their picture painted, or about the painter? What do they think of him or her? Are they thinking about something totally disconnected to the picture? Are they mentally somewhere else entirely?

They might be thinking about something important to them: such as a political event or an affair they are having. Or it may be about something seemingly trivial, such as the noise children are making just outside the frame of the picture, or what they are going to have for lunch.

Sometimes, the smallest details can be the most telling.

Imagine a complete story for the picture based on the notes you have made from the suggestions above. Write a short poem (40 lines or fewer) based on this story.

This time it is up to you to decide who is speaking. You can choose to write it in

  • the first person, the voice of the person in the portrait ('I am bored with having my portrait painted')
  • the second person, as an involved observer of the sitter: possibly even the painter ('You are a striking figure, and you know this perfectly well')
  • the third person, as a 'fly on the wall' or an uninvolved narrator ('He listened absent-mindedly to the sounds outside the window')

Download Exercise 2: Outside the frame (PDF file, 83 KB)

Exercise 3: Details

Aim of the exercise: Practise paying attention to details
Select a single telling detail from the portrait that you chose, to use as the basis for a short piece of writing. Aim to pick something small but interesting and meaningful: a hand, a jewel, a shoe, a book. Here is a selection of details from the portrait images, to give you some ideas.

Ask yourself what your chosen detail has to tell you. Think about how you can use it as the focus of a very short story, or the subject of a brief descriptive poem. Keep in mind the elements you have mentioned in other descriptions, such as colour and texture.

Give your piece a title that describes the detail: for example, 'A Boy's Hand'.

A strict word length is best for this exercise. Allow yourself 50 words for a poem or 100 words for a passage of prose

Download Exercise 3: Details ( PDF file, 65 KB)


Exercise 4: Storytelling 1

Aim of the exercise: Use an object as a starting point for a story
Many objects in museums have stories depicted on them. Often these are well known, like St George and the Dragon or the story behind the willow pattern plates. You can listen to, or read a story about this plate here.

Choose an object or picture that suggests a story to you. (Don't choose one that is associated with a story you already know.)

Imagine either the object/picture itself or the image depicted by the object/in the picture as an important image in a story.

Image
In a piece of prose fiction, this would usually be either a vivid description of a key scene or moment, or a recurring mention of an object, place, or flashback (memory) that means something important within the narrative.

Ask yourself:

  • What sort of story does this image conjure up for me?
  • Where is the story set?
  • Who are the main characters?
  • How does the story begin?
  • How does it end?
  • What happens in between?

Tell the story. You can decide to write it from the point of view of one of the characters, or in the voice of an impersonal narrator (in the third person).

Download Exercise 4: Storytelling 1 (PDF file, 82 KB)
'Crowded street scene in Lahore' by William Carpenter, 1855, Museum no. IS.53-1882

'Crowded street scene in Lahore' by William Carpenter, pencil and watercolour on paper, India (Lahore), 1855, Museum no. IS.53-1882


Exercise 5: Storytelling 2

Aim of the exercise: To experiment with the effect of colour on a narrative
Try the previous exercise (Storytelling 1) again with the following modification.

Colour
Begin your description of the story by describing the scene in black and white or muted tones. When you have written your opening, muted, description, begin to bring colour into your narrative. It is up to you how you do this. You could highlight a single colour throughout the piece (think of Stephen Spielberg's use of the little girl's red coat in his film Schindler's List). You could begin in pale tones and open out into full colour description (think of the way Kansas is filmed in black and white and Oz in technicolour in The Wizard of Oz).

The film camera
Imagine that your eye is like a film camera travelling around the scene: sometimes it comes into close up, describing a detail; sometimes it is in wide shot (panorama) depicting the scene as a whole.

How does the addition of colour alter your narrative?

Was it harder to write in colour, or black and white?

Download Exercise 5: Storytelling 2 (PDF file, 63 KB)


Exercise 6: Mystery objects

Aim of the exercise: Testing your powers of invention
Here are three objects from the V&A collections that will, we hope, keep you guessing.

Pressed glass piano foor by John Derbsyshire & Co, Manchester, UK, 1874-1900. Museum no. CIRC.1175A-1967
Wrought iron gondola prow, Italy, 17th century. Museum no. 9091-1863
Gold pampadam (ear ornament), probably by the Papad Tribe, Tamil Nadu, India, 19th or early 20th century. Museum no. IS.5-1986

Select an object. Write down, as quickly as you can, a list of about thirty descriptive words that the object brings to mind. Choose ten of the most interesting words from this list. These words are to be repeated as key words throughout your piece of writing.

This done, there are many ways in which you can approach the mystery object. Choose one of the three listed below:

  • Decide what you think this object is. Write a museum label or catalogue entry for what you imagine it to be, giving a plausible account of its history. Then use this notice as the basis for a poem or a short story.
  • Don't worry about what the object is. Instead, use it as the basis of a piece of imaginative writing that looks at it in an abstract way. Think of the object as similar to a piece of abstract art. Try to write an abstract poem, or prose poem, to match.

  • The object has magical properties - what are they? How do they work? Who knows about them? Use this idea as a basis for a poem or short story.

To discipline your writing and make you think about the contribution of every word, we suggest that you choose to write a story of no more than eight hundred words or a poem of no more that thirty lines.

If you really want to give yourself a poetic challenge, choose the second option and write a sonnet. If you write a Shakespearean sonnet, you can reveal the object in the closing couplet. If you tackle a Petrarchan sonnet, you can reveal it after the break or 'turn' that traditionally occurs at the end of the first eight lines.

What are these objects, really?

Download Exercise 6: Mystery objects (PDF file, 63 KB)

 

Find out about Mystery object 1

Find out about Mystery object 2

Find out about Mystery object 3

 

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