(It came too late to include in the book, but it will certainly get it’s own chapter in the next edition. Meantime, I can’t wait to see what it might provoke. Give it a try!)  

I write to find out what I have to say. Charles Wright

That’s how creativity works. You can plan all you want, but if you’re lucky your plans crash and up  from the wreckage floats something better than whatever you had in mind.

That’s why exercises function as the heart of my workshops, and new ones occur to me all the time.   The best of them literally take you beyond yourself. When that happens, you suddenly wake up way past whatever it was you were heading for. You’re like a kid who is learning to ride a bicycle and looks back to see the parent you thought was running beside you and steadying you standing 50 yards back … grinning. And you realize that you’ve been riding your bike just fine on your own.

That’s what I want an exercise to do. And that’s why exercise form the spine of my workshops.

So here is the assignment: Go out and find a place where you have the feeling that something might have happened, and make a picture of the place.

That’s it.

My thought going into this one was that at the very least it might get people to really pay a more pointed attention to where they were, see the light, the energy, see what the place felt like. Then they could make some pictures.   So off they went on a rainy afternoon to work this out, and the next morning we gathered to screen the pictures.

When the first pictures came up I got a surprise. People had gone beyond what I had in mind. They had actually written down the thing that they felt might have happened. And the things they wrote completely charged the pictures and ignited everyone’s imaginations. The pictures were like short clips from films, and they made you want to see the rest of the movie.

Here’s one. You’ll see what I mean.

I think this one by Michelle Elloway with the swings was the first up, and the menace and sadness that grew out of the picture of these children’s playthings was palpable. it provoked a kind of shocked silence.   Here are a few more, by Kemal Berk Kocabagli and Antelo Devereux.

There were others too, more than I can show here. What I loved about them all was that they took ordinary situations into the imaginations and found hints of dramas, then made the pictures suggest stories without actually telling them. They left plenty of space for viewers to finish them in their own minds.  All of us who saw them became participants in this process.

I think that in any really good work, be it photographic or poetic or any other medium, this is what happens. You begin with a task that is fairly focussed and at the same time open-ended.  And in the process of open-minded wandering you notice something, then follow it to a place that is emotional and often narrative, full of an infective kind of energy. If this happens, viewers/listeners go into some place beyond themselves, like the artist has done.

So there it is, a perfect exercise. When I saw how it worked I felt like Alice finding a mushroom with a note that said Eat me. I’m really quite impatient to see what else you out there might do with this. Please go ahead and try it, and if you get something interesting, send it to me. I really want to see where this goes.