Writing Exercise: Recalling and Rewriting
A prompt that asks writers to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct.
Pick a story that you know and love. It could be from your own life, a family story, a true piece of history, or a work of fiction.
- Write it out in your own words.
- Deconstruct it. Pull out everything that’s in it — you can start with the academic stuff, literary devices, images, etc, but also try to go beyond that. Look at what’s in the story in different categories: write out all the places in the story then make a list of everything that is in those places. Figure out what about it makes you love it. Just keep pulling out parts of it until you feel like it’s totally in pieces.
- Reconstruct the story into something new.
If you get to a reconstructed version before you want to finish writing, try the process again on a new type of story (a true story if your first was fiction, for example).
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