Writing Exercise: Less Than 10 Minutes!

This is really Part 2 of the journaling exercise that I described here. The Part 2 exercise is designed to create the raw material for a more detailed writing based on current journal entries or a random thought. The writing or drawing can be fiction or non fiction. I’ll illustrate the process in this post using a journal entry. The entire process is called an X page. As noted in Part 1, this process was created by Lynda Barry. She refers to it in several of her books and online videos.

The exercise is basically summarized like this. We are trying to fill in details of a scene by asking ourselves questions about the scene. The answers can be factual or imaginative–what we are really trying to do is to generate raw material for a subsequent writing or drawing activity (Parts 3 and 4–which I plan on publishing later.).

Here’s the journal entry that I’m using. This is obviously a handwritten page from my notebook. In case you can’t read it, it says “Did an online urban sketching tutorial (YouTube) conducted by Toby Hassler (I’ve linked Toby’s channel here. This is NOT a link to the tutorial that I used).

The reference below means that the details are on page 265. As an X page.

So, what exactly is an X page? That’s really the subject of this blog post. It’s probably best illustrated as a step by step process using my example.

Step 1: Decide what you want to write about. Here’s I’m going to discuss my Youtube tutorial. Lynda Barry uses an example in one of here videos by thinking of the word “Neighbors” and thinking about that. You can use any starting word. “Government”. “Pets”. “Grocery Shopping”. Whatever. The starting point is personal to you, but also flexible.

Step 2: Take a sheet of paper and draw a big X, corner to corner. It might help to put the title of your subject on the top of the page. The only purpose of the X is to show ourselves that this is NOT a piece of finished writing. It’s ok to make mistakes. It’s even OK not to stay within the lines. Subtle, but effective.

We will then use this sheet to brainstorm answers to the following questions. If you don’t know the answer, or don’t like what you are thinking, make something up.

• What time of day or night is it
• What season is it
• Where does the light come from? What type of light is it
• What’s the weather like
• Where are you
• What’s going on in the scene
• What are you doing
• Why are you there
• Where were you 2 hours earlier to this scene?
• Where were you 2 hours after this scene
• What sounds can you hear
• Is there anyone else in the scene? Who just left
• What do you see around you
• What is directly in front of you
• What do you see if you look to the right
• Look to the left
• What’s behind you
• What’s below and around your feet
• What’s above your head?

The idea is to work through this list as quickly as possible. Certainly less than 10 minutes from selecting the topic, setting up the X page, and answering the questions. As noted earlier, the objective is to generate raw material for the next steps in the process. Thinking, and creative work in general, is sometimes a messy process. Go with it.

Here’s my example from the prompt noted above. I know it doesn’t look like much but we will see later how this can be used. (Sharp eyed readers will notice that the paper used to draw the X page template is different that the paper that I used to answer the prompts)

Go ahead. Try it!