From Richard Sell:
For the last 2018 Writing for Wellness class at Eskenazi our group of four facilitators wanted to present an exercise primarily chosen for enjoyment. We’d had some dark but productive work created in the previous two classes but we wanted their last impressions of the course to be relief—we wanted them to have fun. We designed the days exercise around dialogue creation within a single scene. We would begin a scene and then stop it, ideally at a point of high tension, then ask them to continue the dialogue from that point. As with other exercises, we would use a primer first, something that we hoped everyone would be familiar with. The dinner scene from Titanic was chosen for this purpose given the diversity of age in our group. This choice fit the purpose well as we confirmed everyone had seen the film. The familiarity with the characters and plot helped them move into the scene well. They knew what would happen, and we advised them that they could follow the story as they remembered it, or go wherever they wanted to.
We then provided them a written copy of the scene in a pared down literary format. We hoped participants who had come to the class not only for stress relief but for writing improvement might find the formatting useful. Alternatively, screenplay format might also be useful for its proximity to the original material and spare language.
Then the class was broken into groups with facilitators spread among the participants. We wanted the group dynamic to create a back and forth of dialogue between the participants that would lend itself to the material they would collectively create. We guided them to talk through the exercise. This was one of the few exercises in which the participants eagerly wished to go over the ten minutes we allotted. After the groups were happy with their work they chose parts to read and played out the scene. There was a common theme of indignation or comedy, both in some cases. All of the groups created original material, taking the scene into new territory.
The groups were eager to do another scene. We moved on to our second clip from the film Lars and the Real Girl where Lars brings Bianca, his life-sized doll, to dinner with Karin and Gus and asks if Karin could lend some of her clothes to Bianca. This was a more obscure film we thought none of the class would be familiar with. Unfortunately, about 30% of the class had seen the film, which meant that some of the students were already familiar with the plot and characters.
They also went over time here as well. We wanted them to be on shakier footing and pushed to create from what they didn’t know. Upon presenting their work, reading each of the parts they’d written, we found some of the participants who knew the film had carried their dialogue into similar territory, but again, everything was original and didn’t puppet the rest of the scene or the plot of the film. One of the groups who did know the film even chose to introduce the doll as a character with their own voice.
This wasn’t a traditional wellness exercise, though we did suggest how we re-write such scenes in our head, and how doing so can be a practice of reframing the tense moments that define trauma or stress. Our homework went from the fun to the useful. We asked that they think of these tense moments in their life and the many people involved, and write the people involved as characters that could be changed or manipulated to gain another perspective on the things that cause them stress.
Overall, we thought this was one of the most successful classes because of the intense engagement with the material. We asked participants what they thought the best class was and many agreed on this one. I want to stress that while it was definitely enjoyable, there were classes more useful to wellness than this one, partly because there was nothing compelling the students to complete the homework as this was the last class. We didn’t go deep here, but we had a lot of fun. There was a great deal of conversation and laughing during class. At the close participants expressed a gratitude for the course that we believed was enhanced by the level of engagement.
