Saturday 12 March 2011

I'd Give You My List (But You'd Know It's Mine)

Talking about "creating character" in my creative writing class, I let out with the claim that given an anonymous list of ten specific items in any one person's bedroom (a person in this class, that is), I could identify the person.  "We should do that," one of the students said. We swept over that--on with the task at hand of building character through details, not through generalizations of narration.

Fine, but a half hour after class I thought damn, we should have gone ahead with that bedroom thing. So I tacked that on, via our class message board, to the assignment for Tuesday. At the same time, I composed my own list. 

All that's left in this story, apart from whatever results show up on Tuesday, is me wondering whether or not this is too personal a thing. Creepy, maybe. Offensive, illegal. Out of bounds.

So far, four lists have been posted.

2 comments:

Shelley Banks said...

I wonder... if you asked the same of your friends, would you recognize us?

Gerald Hill said...

You for sure. Let's see, strand of long, dark hair; pair of floor hockey gloves; bits of a poem, or is it a story; Cayman Island trinkets, etc. A giveway.