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The Trapeze: Teaching Trust in Creative Writing

One of the exercises I love to do with students, writing clients, and workshop participants is called “The Trapeze.” Imagine a tiny trapeze artist in your brain. In order to trust herself and her writing, she has to learn to leap from one place to the next.

This is why outlines often fail, why writing blocks arise after too much planning, and why writing can be so boring for many students when they already know where they’re going with an assignment: the brain gets bored walking along a checker board. It would rather leap.

Take a moment to look around (letting your gaze fall upon a nearby view through a window, or even better, being outside with the breeze and the trees—these are also things the brain loves) and settle in to your surroundings. Then open your journal and try this:

Write whatever word comes to your mind in response to the following words. There are no wrong answers. Get still. Listen for the sound of the trapeze that comes. Watch for it. And write one word. Leap. Listen. Watch. And write another. Leap again.

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Now, look at the words you have written in your journal. Circle five of them that spark some emotion or have some attraction for you right now.

Then, using these five words, begin to write a poem. Start with one word, and connect it to another word (now you’re really leaping!) in a phrase. Then use another word in another phrase. Feel free to change a singular word to plural or a noun into a verb. Let the language lead you where it wants to go. Connect one word to the next. After you use the first five words that you’ve circled, keep going. Keep leaping. Keep trusting. See what happens. See how you are learning to fly on the trapeze.

Cassie Premo Steele, Ph.D., is the author of 13 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including most recently Earth Joy Writing, which contains writing prompts and exercises for all the months of the year and provides bonus free audio and video material at www.earthjoywriting.com.

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