On a New Writing Exercise for Workshops

c/o Annie Ernaux

On Monday, I was teaching my final non-fiction class of the year, the very last one, and of course I came up with what seems to me a great getting-to-know-one-another exercise.

It is based on the POV of two books. First, the novel I’ve recently finished writing. Second, Annie Ernaux’s The Years (Fitzcarraldo, 2018, translated by Alison L. Strayer).

I still am feeling too superstitious to say much about the novel.

However, I’m more than happy to write about The Years.

It is the autobiography of a generation — girls then women — born in France at the end of the Second World War.

Annie Ernaux chose to write it in a first-person plural ‘we’ voice, and only to refer to herself as ‘she’.

This means Ernaux ends up writing collective-covering sentences such as —

We started going to school with slates and chalk-holders, passing fields that had been cleared of debris and levelled for reconstruction.

and —

We had time to desire things, plastic pencil cases, crepe-soled shoes, gold watches. Their possession did not disappoint. We held them up to the admiration of others. They contained a mystery and magic that survived their contemplation and handling. Turning them this way and that, we continued to expect something unfathomable.

(Similar sentences occur in my novel. That’s all I’m saying.)

In other words, one way Ernaux marks the passage of the years is through generational experiences. We all bought this or We all hated doing that.

Anyway, wasting no more time, the writing exercise is this —

Divide your group into pairs or, if it is a large enough group, into threes.

You could do this just by having those who are sitting next to one another team up. But especially if it’s a diverse group, you should try to put people who seem very dissimilar together.

Write on the board three dates five years apart, for example:

2010 —

2015 —

2020 —

If the average age of the group is higher, you might want to go further back.

Now you tell the group that each pair or three needs, through discussion, to construct a collective sentence that covers something they did in each year — one that holds true for each of them but also all of them.

Be as specific as possible. Go into the tiniest detail possible.

Give the group ten or fifteen minutes to do this; after which, everyone reads out at least one of the sentences that their two or three has written.

If there is a big positive reaction from the whole group to any particular sentence, do a straw poll. Hands up if that covers you as well?

Does anything bring everyone in the room together? What is it?

In my class, this exercise resulted in lots of laughter, recognition, connection.

For example, one pair came up with —

In 2010, we were obsessed with collecting Gogos — you know, those little plastic figures in bright colours.

and another —

In 2015, we read Alex Rider books and admired him because he was fit and confident and talked back to his teachers.

and again —

In 2020, we watched TikTok videos by Joe Wicks which we liked because he got out of breath and seemed real.

I’ve only run The Years exercise once, so I’m sure that pairs and threes would work differently. And because they were third-year undergraduates, my group was already a single generation — but I think this would work really well (perhaps even better) if you were bringing together very varied ages, backgrounds, cultures.

It might be that a trio ended up writing —

In 2020, we went for a socially distanced walk in the local park and saw a grey squirrel running up a tree and thought it looked lovely.

But wouldn’t that be wonderful if they were three people who seemed too different to have anything at all in common?

I’ve recently been involved with the Hard Art Collective, and they/we are very big on the potential for Citizens’ Assemblies — as a way of making better political decisions, and of giving real power to non-politicians.

This exercise seems a mini version of what happens in those groupings, usually of around 100 people, who have been brought together to represent an area or a whole country in shaping public policy.

They often start out disagreeing but end up — through fag break conversations about nightmare bus travel, and sharing photos of their cats — discovering what they have in common. And that it’s far more powerful than culture wars or prejudices.

In a way, by trying to come to a collective statement, Citizens’ Assemblies are forced to do a huge and elaborate version of this exercise.

What can we agree on? What do we share?

e.g., Squirrels, perhaps.

If you do try this exercise, please let me know how it goes, and which variations and elaborations worked best for you.