Hope and Despair: A Writing Exercise

When we write about feelings, we shouldn't skim the top and move on. It's quite easy to do that. Why? We don't always want to dig deep to see what we find about our feelings, especially the negative one. Writing about our feelings helps us face them and act upon them. We might want to tone them down a bit or rev them up, depending on what kind of feeling you're viewing.

Learning about our own feelings and how we deal with them can only help with the characters fiction writers create, the ones that memoir writers feature, or the people in our family stories.

The weekend is upon us. Maybe you'll have a little more writing time. For an exercise do a freewrite on the two feelings in the signpost above. Hope and Despair. Two opposites, for sure.

To freewrite:  Put the word first, then let your fingers fly across the keyboard or with your pencil and let all thoughts about the word spew forth. Don't stop to think. Keep writing even it seems like gibberish. When you do it this way, thoughts from the inner recesses of your mind will be found. Set a timer for 10 minutes, but if you're still going strong then, just keep going. You might be very surprised at what you have when you stop. No one but you will see this, so don't spare your own feelings; let your thoughts emerge.

My online writing group does a freewrite exercise each week. One member chooses the 4 or 5 words for the month, sends them on the weekend, and those who choose to do them take off. Doing two freewrite or, as we call them Random Word, exercises a month count for one submission. Let's face it, anyone can spare 10 minutes out of the day to do a simple exercise like this. Many of us have expanded on our exercise and written full stories or essays.

Hope prompts:  Think about the hopes you may have had as a child or a teen. What about your hopes for now and in the future? What is hope? How does it figure in your daily life?

Despair prompts:  When were you filled with despair? What did you do to change? Did you ever enjoy the feeling of despair? How can you keep despair out of your life?

The prompts above are only to help you get started. You'll come up with plenty more. Have fun with this, then try applying some of what you found for your characters.