Do you know what a Calligramme is? I didn’t either until a few moments ago. I have a book called ‘Take Ten for Writers’ written by Bonnie Neubauer. The premise is that you use a writing exercise in the book and write for ten minutes. It’s a pretty cool book. The only thing I don’t like is that it claims to have 1,000 writing exercises, but there’s really only 100. Each exercise has ten ‘variations’. It’s the same prompt, but you pick a random number from 1 to 10 and then turn the page to find out what variation you will use in your writing. So there are 100 exercises with 10 variations each, so hence the 1,000 exercises. But 100 exercises is still a good number of exercises and so I’m happy with the book. But, I digress.
Exercise 10 in the book is all about Calligrammes. Calligrammes are pieces of writing that are in a shape that pertains to your topic. I have a 10 sided die and I roll it when doing the exercises to ensure my ‘variation’ number truly is random. So I rolled a number and my exercise was to write a stop sign shaped piece of writing that begins with ‘Stopping was . . .’. So I set my Write or Die Desktop edition for 10 minutes and began to write. Here’s a picture of my scribbling.
Then I went into Scrivener and attempted to type it into the desired shape. This was my result.
The typed version looks more like a vase than a stop sign, but you get the idea. 🙂
If you’re interested in checking out the Take Ten for Writers book by Bonnie Neubauer, CLICK HERE
Happy Reading!
~ Eileen 🙂
Eileen Maki 