Daniel Sluman’s 5-Day Writing Challenge – Day 3

Experiments

Charles Bernstein’s page of writing experiments has been a wonderful source of exercises and ideas for many writers. They can be helpful if you’re feeling blocked creatively, or you want to jumpstart an existing piece that feels stuck. There are almost a hundred different ideas on the page linked to today’s exercise that you can pick and select from whenever you feel like it, but today we are going to do exercise number one. This is an English to English (or whatever your primary language) translation, where you can either translate word for word (with www.thesaurus.com at hand), or you can apply a freer translation which is more about the spirit of each line. So ‘the sun shone over the fields’ could become something like ‘the light stretched over the grass’. You can do this to any existing piece of yours, but it might be useful to apply this exercise to some of the material you have written in the first two days. Have fun!

To find the exercise (number one of Charles Bernstein’s Experiments), click here.