Writing from The Heart: In-Depth Writing Exercise 5: Train Stations

Writing from The Heart

"Writing from The Heart" is a workshop on creative writing, creative drawing, and creative drama. There are three available versions of this workshop: one for beginners on the secondary, tertiary, and graduate levels, and another for practitioners. A third version of this workshop is designed as an outreach program to disadvantaged and underserved audiences such as the disabled, the poor and the marginalized, victims of human trafficking, battered women and abused children, drug rehabilitation center residents, child combatants, children in conflict with the law, prisoners, and gang leaders. This third version incorporates creativity and problem awareness, conflict resolution, crisis intervention, trauma therapy, and peacemaking.

Monday, November 2, 2015

In-Depth Writing Exercise 5: Train Stations

This exercise does not have a time limit. It cannot be completed in one hour or at one sitting, and it requires your honesty and your introspection.

Take a box of crayons and a sheet of clean manila paper. Pin or tape the sheet on a board.

Draw a train line with several stations marking your journey and your accomplishments, big or small, as a writer. The track can be as long and as straight or as winding as you like, and you may locate as many stations as you like.

Which parts of the tracks are on level ground, in tunnels, spanning rivers, and going up and down gradated slopes? What do they represent in your writing career?

Name the stations and add on to them as necessary. Which stations were pleasant, which unpleasant? Who were the significant people you met on the train, who at the station?

What were the important lessons you learned at every trip and at every station?

Did your train ever get delayed or break down? If so, why?

Very soon you will see that you've come a long way, and that every success and every failure was well worth it.