Prompt and a Half

Posted: June 17th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Uncategorized |

Well, hello there.  On this glorious Thursday evening in the Pico/Fairfax district, should you find yourself not basking in the glory– perusing facebook for friends’ cousins’ friends’ summah-vacay-in-Solvang photos or ravenously checking the WWLA Twitter account for new updates (which, alright, we’ll condone), we at WWLA entreat you to indulge in this stimulating yet zippy little prompt.

Write a non-verbal dialogue between two or three characters.  This could either be naturalistic–  you could illustrate two people eying each other from across a classroom– or exaggerated– a vegetarian and a meat-eater eying each other eying a turkey from across a table (these are just our piddling examples.  Go wild.  Go wilder).  Explore the ways in which physicality, gesture, silence and perhaps even a smidgen of onomatopoeia can express each character’s emotional state, relationship to other characters, power, power struggle, etc. within a scene.

Then, as if this weren’t already fun enough, write the same scene, but with the characters adapted to being something inhuman– perhaps an animal, perhaps a monster, perhaps an alien or even an object.  How do the minute details of non-verbal interaction change when the human anatomy is taken out of the picture?  Do you now have more or fewer freedoms?

-Moze Halperin (intern)

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