Love. Everyone writes
about it, sings about it, thinks about it. Does anyone know what it is?
Does it matter? This section is divided into two sections: Romantic and Platonic.
1. Two friends are in
love with the same person. One describes their feelings honestly and well,
the other is unwilling or unable to do so, but betrays their feelings through
appearance and action. Write the scene.
2. Write a love scene,
serious or comic, from the limited omniscient view point, confining yourself
to objective observation and the thoughts of one character. Make this character
believe that the other loves them, while the external actions make clear
to the reader that this is not so.
3. Write a one page scene
in which you show the complexity of love through the inclusion of anger,
sorrow, desire and lust. In the scene, announce that love is complex. Then
choose and illustrate three other emotions that love includes.
4. Write the same scene
as no. 3 without naming the emotions you chose. How can you show the reader
a love that includes these three other emotions?
5. What are the similarities
and differences between love and lust? If you like, pick up a cheap romance
novel to help you along.
6. Take one of the exercises
you did for the emotion Hate and rewrite it as love. How can an example
of hate turn around and be an example of love?
1. Write a paragraph
that ends with Schine's line "a life almost unbearably full, euphoric and
miraculously hers." In the sentences preceeding, have a mother thinking
about all the maddening things that describe her child, actions and habits
that we would not usually consider lovable.
2. Write a two to three
page scene about a parent watching his adult child enter a new stage in
life: wedding, birth of a grandchild, bas mitzvah, prom, college. What
does the parent think about while watching the older child "leave" in a
way? What kind of realization might occur?
3. Write five different
paragraphs, each one exploring two opposite feelings. For example, despair
and joy, guilt and innocence.