[AE.NiNoBilMa] NiNoBilMa January 2022: First Grade
The thing that became NiNoBilMa has its roots in my adult, ADHD-medicated regret over not having internalized or retained the writing structures that were taught to me back in my school days, like the three-point essay or story structures based on number of acts. So as we begin the first month proper of NiNoBilMa 2022 -- which symbolically corresponds to the first grade of elementary school -- we're going to focus on the most elementary versions of those I could contrive.
Our approach for this the month is to practice writing very simple five-part outlines and then practice expanding them into (short) prose. If any of your efforts jump the fence and turn into longer pieces, that's great! Chase those suckers over hill and over dale and there back and again, if the muse moves you. But as always, we measure success in having written something. Anything.
As I'm trying to shore up my skills as both a fiction writer (which has been most personally rewarding for me) and a non-fiction writer (which has been most professionally rewarding for me), I'm splitting this general exercise into two categories: Story and Essay.
The very simple version of what we're doing here is writing a story or an essay by using the absolute simplest version of a five-point outline I can articulate ("premise, point 1, point 2, point 3, conclusion" for an essay, and "beginning, event 1, event 2, event 3, ending for a story") and then writing the contents of the outline out as a prose paragraph or set of sentences. That's it. It's an exercise I will be engaging in throughout the month, and as always with #NiNoBilMa, I invite anyone who wants to join in to do so.
Now, as we learned in December that "just write something" can be too open-ended to be helpful, I will continue to suggest topics. You may feel free to ignore them if you would rather write about something else; we fully encourage you to go where the inspiration is strongest.
So, our topics for January are:
Animals. Same reasoning as before: they're familiar, evocative, and most people are familiar with some.
Games or Toys. They're fun and this helps keep us on the same general level of seriousness.
Food. Most people have some strong emotional connections and sensory/memory associations for particular foods. While this can make it an esasy thing to write about it, it can also make it a fraught topic to write about, which is why we included the games/toys topic above it... please think of food as an option that can be subbed in for it if you find you don't have much to say about toys or games at this point in your life, or that you have more to say about food.
Detailed Process
The Essay
I'm labeling these essays and not something more specific like opinion pieces, persuasive pieces, or informational pieces because there is not a more specific goal here than write something about something. Many of my attempts are likely to be about a favorite of mine or something I like, but I'll I'm only be laying out reasons in order to explain my opinion, not in an attempt to convert anybody else to it. My supporting reasons may be about qualities of the subject itself, but they could also be personal details, like a connection between a kind of food and my family or a time and place in my life.
To outline the essay, I'll start a numbered list with five items, each one being about one sentence or so.
A premise: An opinion or something about myself I want to explain in brief. ("Sautéed onions might take longer than five minutes to caramelize, but they're worth the effort.")
Reason 1: Something that supports the premise. ("They smell amazing.")
Reason 2: Something else that supports the premise. ("They have a sweetness that pairs well with a savory dish.")
Reason 3: A third thing that supports the premise. ("They let you pile way more oniony goodness on top of something without overpowering the other flavors.")
Conclusion: An ending point that at least restating the premise. ("So just factor in more time to let the onions cook properly. You'll be happy you did!")
Ideally a conclusion might do more than merely restate the premise, but with the brevity of the form we're using there won't be much else to condense or summarize.
To write it, I will take what I've written as items in the outline and (re)write them out in paragraph form, making whatever edits might be needed to make it flow as prose, like so:
"Sautéed onions might take longer than five minutes to caramelize, but they're worth the effort. They smell amazing. They have a sweetness that pairs well with a savory dish. They let you pile way more oniony goodness on top of something without overpowering the other flavors. So just factor in more time to let the onions cook properly. You'll be happy you did!"
That's it. That's our "1st Grade" version of an essay. It's only six sentences long, but that's a clear success.
Is it great writing? No. Is it my best writing? No. Is it writing? Yes. It's short. It's not terribly compelling. But it exists and I wrote it. I wrote it quickly and to a specification.
The Story
Although I described the category break as being based on my predilection for fiction and non-fiction, a story can also be creative non-fiction. I realized while testing these exercises that it's easy to turn an outline about a favorite food or game of mine into a little story about myself, if the reasons I pick are personal to me.
To outline the story, I will also use a numbered list with five items, each one being about one sentence or so.
An opening, a set-up introducing a character and the situation they're in. ("Once upon a time a rabbit lived on a beach.")
An event or detail. ("The rabbit loved to look out over the ocean at sunset but hated dealing with the cold night winds and the spray.")
Another event or detail. ("The beach wasn't any good for burrowing, and the rabbit's dens kept filling in with sand or water.")
A third event or detail. ("The rabbit took up painting in order to capture what they liked about the ocean and leave behind what they didn't.")
An ending. ("Now the rabbit lives in a warm, dry burrow in a grassy meadow, with a view of the ocean on every wall.")
As with the essay, turning this into prose is as simple as re-writing the five items, like so:
"Once upon a time a rabbit lived on a beach. The rabbit loved to look out over the water at sunset but hated dealing with the cold night winds and the stinging ocean spray. The beach also wasn't any good for burrowing, and the poor rabbit's dens kept filling in with sand and water. So, the rabbit took up painting in order to capture what they liked about the ocean and leave behind what they didn't. Now the rabbit lives in a warm, dry burrow in a grassy meadow, with a view of the ocean on every wall."
Again, nothing too fancy. I did add some modifiers and do some minor edits as I went. But that's a 1st Grade story for our purposes. I used the events/details to give the rabbit a dilemma but you might notice that isn't part of the instructions. If I had a written more of a vignette that just described three things about the rabbit who lives at the beach or three things that happened to the rabbit at the beach and wrapped it up with "And that's the story of the rabbit who lives at the beach," that's
Stuck For Ideas?
As I have paired two forms with three topics, I will be using a six-sided die a lot if I don't have a clear idea in my head for what I'm doing, like so:
Animal Essay
Animal Story
Game/Toy Essay
Game/Toy Story
Food Essay
Food Story.
I created my rabbit story opening by using a combination of the random animal generator at https://www.randomlists.com/random-animals and the random word generator at https://www.randomlists.com/random-words, using dice to decide which animal (rabbit) and which words (artist and beach) I would pair together; I started with just one word but "rabbit" and "beach" didn't really spark anything until I added a second word.
The other two topics possibly don't lend themselves quite as well to random selections as you might not have any strong connection to a random food item, but you could always create a list of categories like meals or different types of food (meat, vegetable, fruit, pastry), or make a list of specific things you know you could write about and then use a die to pick one.
Goals
My personal goals are as follows:
Daily: Each workday, do one exercise if I can, mostly either as a warm-up or an end of day cool-down.
By End of Month: Have one completed example of each form/topic pairing, and at least one example overall I feel good about.
Overall Goal: To get comfortable with sitting down, outlining something, and then writing it. To begin thinking of my writing in terms of a formal structure
In order to help motivate myself to do it as often as I can, I will be sharing a NiNoBilMa Journal file at the end of the month that has all my exercises (or at least all the ones I feel comfortable sharing; I won't be screening them based on quality alone, but I can't guarantee I'll feel they're all fit for public consumption.)
That's it!
Happy writing.