6 March 2003

Adventures in Writing with Max Merriwell
by Pat Murphy
www.brazenhussies.net/murphy

Pat Murphy has won numerous awards for her science fiction and fantasy writing, including the Nebula Award for best novel, the Philip K. Dick Award for best paperback original, and the World Fantasy Award. Her novels include Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell, Wild Angel, There and Back Again, Nadya — The Wolf Chronicles, The Falling Woman, and The Shadow Hunter. She lives in San Francisco, where she works for the Exploratorium, a museum of science, art, and human perception. She has taught writing at Stanford University and at the Clarion Writers Workshop. Her favorite color is ultraviolet.

Max Merriwell is a prolific writer. Each year, he writes three novels: a science fiction novel under his own name, a fantasy novel under the pseudonym Mary Maxwell, and a mystery under the pseudonym Weldon Merrimax.

Max also teaches writing. Last year, he taught a writing workshop aboard a cruise ship. When the ship went into the Bermuda Triangle, events of novels that Max had written began to bleed through into the reality of the cruise ship — and Max's pseudonyms started showing up and making trouble.

Max Merriwell is a character in my last novel, Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell. He is also a pseudonym of mine. He wrote There and Back Again (though my publisher made me put my name on the cover.) For the full twisted tale of Max Merriwell and the three-book project that creating him involved me in, check out my web site.

For the purposes of this article, the important thing about Max is: He teaches writing. Shortly after Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell came out, I received an email from Carolyn Hill, a writing instructor at University of California at Berkeley. She was having her students read the novel and do the exercises that Max uses in his shipboard writing workshop. Carolyn said the students were having a great time.

"What a great idea!" I thought. Max's exercises were based on exercises that I had created for a science fiction writing class that I taught at Stanford University. After hearing from Carolyn, I've started incorporating Max's exercise into my own teaching. They do seem to help people get in touch with their feelings about what they are writing — perhaps because I crafted these exercises to reveal the feelings of the novel's main character, Susan. I've found that these exercises can sometimes help writers discover their own feelings about what they are writing. (If you'd like to read the scene and see what Susan wrote, you can check it out here.)

In the next few issues of the Broadsheet, I'll be giving you some of Max's writing exercises. I'd suggest you do these in the same way that I have students do exercises in class. Imagine, if you will, that you are in a writing class surrounded by other students. The instructor gives you the following assignment and you have to do it immediately, sitting there at your desk. You have only five minutes to complete it.

No, you can't read the assignment and then go get a cup of tea and mull it over. No, you can't take all afternoon because you have all afternoon. (You can try that later if you like. First, try it my way.) Five minutes. That's it. Set a timer if you have one.

The limited time, which may seem like a nasty constraint, can actually be quite liberating. When I only have five minutes, I don't expect myself to be able to do much of anything. That lack of expectation seems to set me free. Because I have so little time, I give myself permission to write badly — and that, I feel, is an important prerequisite to writing well.

As you work, imagine that you are surrounded by other people who are all scribbling in their notebooks. Imagine that the instructor is also scribbling.

With that preamble, here's the exercise. If you like, you can do this exercise from the viewpoint of a character you are writing about rather than from your own viewpoint. That's up to you. If you are stuck in a story or novel, figuring out more about your character may help you get unstuck — and this exercise can help you figure out more about what matters to your character. Ready? Here goes:

I want you to think about something that matters to you (or to a character you are writing about). This should be an object of some sort that you have strong feelings about. Something you love or something you hate — I don't care which — but something that matters to you. Write down what you are thinking about.

Once you've done that, write down a couple of lines about that object. Describe it. You don't have to write in sentences. Just write something.

Now write a few words about how that object makes you feel. Don't worry if some of the feelings are contradictory. That's just the way it is, sometimes.

Now I want you to put all that together into a scene. A very short scene involving the object you have described. A scene that comes out of your feelings about the object.

So, how did it go?

In my experience, students who swore it took them hours to get a few words down on paper would scribble furiously for the five minutes allowed — and glare at me when I told them to stop, wanting nothing more than to continue. In five minutes time, they'd come up with fascinating material.

I don't know whether this exercise will work as well without an instructor imposing a time limit, but I figure it's worth a try. (If you have any comments on this exercise and how it worked (or didn't work) for you, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to drop me a line at jaxxx@well.com.)