Writing Exercise: Smart, well-informed hating
I first created this exercise a couple of months ago when I did a craft talk + workshop for Lostintheletters based around the importance of being a well-informed hater. This is something I developed after my brilliant friend Ali Raz, whose novella Alien you should buy here, visited a class of mine and shared her own thoughts about the importance of hatred in writing, as well as this great article by Bhrigupati Singh, “Writing with Love and Hate”.
As the title of this article suggests, Singh discusses hate not as love’s opposite, but as a kind of necessary sibling, or other-self. Borrowing from Deleuze, she states that “…nothing is ever gained by books against something. ‘If you don’t admire something, if you don’t love it, you have no reason to write a word about it’”. Smart, informed hating (as opposed to bigoted hatred, reflexive, unthoughtful hatred), cannot exist without deep love for something or someone.
I’ve used this exercise several times with students and workshop participants since the initial talk, and folks have found it pretty fun to engage with. Generally, I incorporate it into lessons I teach in regards to characterization or plot, citing texts by Walter Benjamin, Fleur Jaeggy, Osamu Dazai, Denis Johnson, and others, whose work I find very useful in discussing love and hatred’s symbiotic relationship. While I’m unfortunately unable to show the workshop in its entirety here, I’d like to share this exercise so that other educators, facilitators, and writers might find use in it, and to think of other writers who might demonstrate this well.
I also think it’s important for us to be in conversation with each other when it comes to writing craft, and to share resources with one another whenever possible. Having conversations with my students is always fruitful as they continue to teach me more about the possibilities of writing and literature, and because we often discuss different craft “rules” that have been presented as objective truths within so many creative writing classrooms in the U.S. Matthew Salesses’ book Craft in the Real World has been especially helpful to me in talking about the latter, and I recommend it to almost everyone. This is all to say that you can take what seems the most useful and true for you and use it however you’d like.
The following exercise tends to help students with getting rid of anything that stands between the character and the emotion itself, or what stands in between the reader’s ability to access the characters’ emotions as they might experience them. It also helps to create more developed characters in general, not forcing them to just take one “side” and therefore robbing them of the complexity that makes us human. I also realized I combined part II and III together in my example…oops.
Desire is linked to action. We cannot want a thing without also imagining a means by which to take it. We cannot want a thing without imagining what it would be like to not actualize it. Once we are not able to actualize this taking, hatred is born.
Part I: Write down five things that your character hates.
Part II: From there, write five sentences each on why they hate these specific things. Write five actions that they perform as a result of this hatred.
Part III: Then gather all of this into a scene, but without using the word “hatred”.
Daisuke’s examples:
PART I: Marie hates dogs. Marie hates people who mumble when they speak. Marie hates the way her hair looks. Marie hates sweet tea. Marie hates small talk.
PART II: Marie hates dogs because she loves how sweet they looked to her before she was bitten by one in the first grade. Marie hates people who mumble because she loves people who were outspoken and defended her when she was bullied as a child. Marie hates the way her hair looks because she loves the way her mother’s looks — long and grey. Marie hates sweet tea because she loved her brother who used to drink it, and then he died. Marie hates small talk because she loves when people feel brave enough to ask her what’s wrong, and she wishes people would do this more often.
PART III: I was walking back from school wearing my shitty shoes, all flappy and worn and every so often I’d get a rock in them and have to shake them out. All day I’d dealt with Connor and his stupid group of guys mouthin’ at me for them. Saying me and Ma were poor and couldn’t even afford new shoes and so I told Connor I’d sock him in the mouth. That shut him up but not for long. By the end of it all of us were in detention and I still had ugly shoes.
I get home and Ma’s got sandwich fixings on the table for me. There’s a big jug of tea sitting right beside it.
Marie, she says, get you a sandwich and then sit down.
Ma’s hair, long and grey, flutters all the way down her backside. She’s always worn it like this and it’s like it grows longer each day. If Thomas were still here he’d have drank all this disgusting tea and then some. Opened up the packets himself and start brewing more. But he’s dead, he died and left me all alone.
I don’t want a sandwich, I say to Ma.
But she’s not listening. Just looking out the window. Looks like it’s gonna storm, don’t ya think, Marie?
I don’t say nothing. Instead I go upstairs and slam the door to my room hard. Out my window I see Connor and his gang of boys coming down the road. His ugly little golden retriever with its big yellow head running up right next to them. Looking so pleased and eager, with its tongue dribbling happiness every which way.