Interpreting

The following approaches might be used when writing groups want to investigate and unravel their thoughts about events, texts or topics of mutual interest or concern. 

For example, each person might

• write freely from a different line of a poem

• write in the voice of a different object or character

• incorporate a story’s objects and events into their own story or sequence

Explaining texts, pictures and experiences to each other, translating them into our own words, releases different voices, styles and attitudes.

Before reading a text or approaching a topic, we might write what we already know and think about it, acknowledging what we’re not certain of, what we might want to ask or find out.

During reading or studying, we might write in order to reflect, question, anticipate and predict. By doing this we may be able to more clearly detect the passage of our thoughts and learning.

Later writing might re-interpret our earlier ideas. With hindsight we may wish to explain why we first thought as we did, and why we now think and feel as we do.

Here are some group exercises in interpreting:

Picture Prompts

Colours: What’s In A Name?

Things I’ve Learned

Using Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

Writing in a museum or gallery

What first attracts your attention?
What does it remind you of?
What sounds might you hear ?
Describe the texture or smell of something in the image.
What might lie outside the frame?
What might just have taken place, or be about to happen?
Why did the photographer or artist make this image?
On closer inspection, what small detail did you not notice at first?
For whom might this image be special, and why?
What caption might you give this image?

Then each writer takes off in their own direction - perhaps for 10-15 minutes.

Pairs might share by handing the image to their partner as they read or talk about what they wrote or thought.

The names are partly for ease of identification, but also to aid sales by associating colours with exotic places, pleasant moods, or desirable objects. (Our garage door is basically yellow, but the name of the colour on the tin was 'Tibetan gold'. The paint is now flaking and I've long forgotten the number, but I can still remember the name. So I suppose the association has worked. I get a pleasant glow. It's not that I think of the Dalai Lama smiling outside some ornate Buddhist temple. But Chinese troops at dawn? Himalayan jaundice? Not so much.)

What would you name these colours? What associations - pleasant or unpleasant - do they have for you? This could be done singly or in pairs. In a large group, sharing afterwards would provoke plenty of discussion. One group generated 'Mendelssohn green, Baguette and onion, Orchard owl and Faint Michelle'.

Using Shaun Tan’s ‘The Arrival’

A sequence in seven steps. Please use flexibly - adapt, abridge, abandon

1. 'Read' the first Chapter of Shaun Tan's 'The Arrival'. Talk about issues of representation (race/class/gender) and provenance (Shaun Tan's experience of Australia/ his use of photographs of Ellis Island). The effect of the style of drawing and the period represented are worth discussing. Who would you like to be? Not like to be ? What connections can you make to your own life and your understanding of the world?

2. Return to pages 2 and 3 (see above). Challenge writers to work in pairs or small groups to attach a single word or phrase to each one of the 9 small pictures. Explore the effect of attaching nouns or verbs only (what are the hands 'doing'?); try adjectives; try prepositions; try a nine-word sentence. Discuss 'warm' and 'cold' words, by considering the different emotional 'temperature' reached by attaching words and phrases such as 'photograph' or 'family' or 'together' or 'the three of us' to the top left picture. (This will have a bearing on how a similar image is 'read' in chapter 2.) 

3. Discuss the openings of stories by asking, 'Where does this story start?'  and consider the effects of different kinds of sentences that might be attached to the scene of the picture on page 3 - a line of dialogue, a descriptive statement, a foreshadowing, a question.

4. Create a 'class poem' by writing down suggested sentences and arranging them in order - introducing a refrain. The following are first drafts and might be trimmed, scanned and patterned for further effect.

e.g. from Birmingham writers 28.1.2014

Time to let go

Time to let go.
Letting go of the past to hope for a better future.

Time to let go.
A family divided by dreams.

Time to let go.
Heavy heart.


e.g from Reading writers 28.2.2014 having shaped the first responses, following clues of tense, person and pattern

Leaving

Living with loss:
"I'll see you again."

Losing my life:
"I am sad to be leaving."

Leaving, it costs.
"I don't want to go."

Loving you now.
"I know."

Since we have all, at one time or another, left one location and gone to another, we can reflect on the reasons and choices available to us. Whose point of view will we choose - and what difference does it make? This exercise can generate personal writing of all kinds. For some groups, it may be enough to stop here and use this as a jumping-off point for further writing.

SCAVENGER HUNTS are a great way of looking differently at a place, and they appear elsewhere on this site. They are based on the idea of a scavenger hunt where you are asked to go out an collect objects –a stone, a feather, something that would fit in a matchbox and so on. In a writing scavenger hunt you simply write the collection and of course there is the invitation to interpret the list in ways that suit the writer. When you are creating he list you may have a particular emphasis in mind, so you may wish to include the five senses or the more abstract, but you may also wish to draw attention to a certain aspect of the space. The other thing that I think about is ways of looking and thinking.

Here’s one for the National Gallery:

Something golden
Something grey
Something glimpsed from the corner of the eye
Something only seen on closer looking
Something high up
No more than five consecutive words written on something other than paper.
An uncertainty
A sound made by a person
A sound made by a machine
A swooping

You can see how easy it is to make up your own suggestions. Once the collection is made you can find that you may wish to write in a way that includes them all or that one or two things have particular taken your interest.

COLLECTING is something that we often do when looking and writing in museums or galleries, which are in themselves, collections. It works in a similar way to the scavenger hunt. So....a collection of:

shoes/feet ; eyes; jewellery; red things; golden things; hands and gloves; joints and hinges –knees, elbows, hinged lids, wrists.....; hats and hairdos; distant things; very small things.....and on and on....

CHAINS OF ASSOCIATION can take you to all sorts of interesting places. Start somewhere....with something that catches your attention, make a brief note and then follow it with something that links ......

the eye of the man in the portrait seems to be looking at the painting of a child on the opposite side of the room, the child is dressed in pale blue that is echoed by the blue eyes of the portrait next to her and those blue eyes remind you of your mother who loves flowers and look at these flowers in the background of the painting , neat and pale like this young woman walking through the gallery –

….you get the idea.

SENTENCE STARTERS AS A WAY OF LOOKING

Kenneth Koch gave children sentence starters to help them frame poems. In a museum or gallery some of these might work as a way of looking – and may be personal or be spoken by objects in the museum or figures in paintings-

I remember......
I used to.... but now.....
I seem... but really...
My secret is....
I want to ask you......
Tell me.......

WORKING WITH PAINTINGS This exercise comes from Peter Sansom (1994) Writing Poetry. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, and is based on postcards. You can use the prompts in response to postcards from the gallery but could also use the original painting, print or photograph. You are not trying to answer these questions ‘correctly’.

What is the first detail you notice? Elaborate, a line or two lines.
What time of day is it, and what does this mean?
What is/ are the main colour(s) in the picture?
What does that make you think of?
What do you hear in the picture? What does it sound like?
What is happening in the picture? And why?
There is a detail that you haven’t noticed till now. Write a line or two about it.
Write a line that follows from the last but including the word ‘always’.
If the painter/photographer had moved a fraction to the right, what would also be included in the scene? (What is happening just out of the frame to the right?)
Bring someone (yourself? A friend?) into the writing in some way.
You have a maximum of five lines to finish the poem/prose. Try to repeat a word or phrase from somewhere near the beginning of your writing. You may wish to finish on a rhyme or half rhyme.

SIMPLE PORTRAIT RESPONSE A simpler approach, using portraits. These prompts are the basis of note taking, to be shaped later.

Who is this person?
Do they have a name?
Where does he or she live?
What colour are the eyes, skin, hair?
How would you describe the expression of the person in the picture?
What is the person feeling?
What is the person thinking?
What is the person looking at?
What sounds can be heard within the picture? [I always think that snatches of song, words spoken, are strong elements here]
What is the person doing?
Describe one detail about the person that you have especially noticed.

Put your notes aside and use them as much or as little as you wish. Write a poem or piece of prose based on the picture. Describe what you see or let the person in the picture speak or speak to the person or tell the story of the picture or....do whatever you have thought of ........

Questions for a landscape

Write in complete sentences in response to these prompts. It doesn’t have to hold together and children can revise and shape it once they have the ideas down. However, you will find that mostly they do –that is why you need to write in sentences.

• Describe the first thing you notice in the picture.

• Write a sentence with a colour in it.

• Write a sentence with a comparison in it [e.g. the tree is like.......]

• There is a detail in the scene that you may not have noticed before, describe it.

• You can hear something in the landscape, what is it?

• Something is hidden in the scene. What is it?

• Someone or something is about to enter the scene. Say who/ what it is and how they will appear.

You should have the opening of a story.

Here is an example: There is a kissing gate where the soft green path leads down through the field and alongside the wood. Far away the hills and the blue sky melt together. The hedge alongside the distant path is like a sturdy stone wall. Between the trees and the distant hills there is a strip of water, the lake looking back up at the sky. A lark is singing high in the sky. Down beyond the curve of the hill, at the next gate, there is a message hidden beneath a smooth round stone. Any moment now, Sally Jane will walk down to the gate with her dog, Flossie.

The thing about a setting, is that the writer can imagine it and use it when s/he is writing. In one of Berlie Doherty’s stories about Tilly Mint we learn that she lives on a hill, that she can see trees from her house and there is a park nearby. When she is taken to play in the park, the leaves are an important part of the story, and the bench where her child minder sits for a rest. We can imagine our own picture of the houses and the park. BD will have a picture in her head and she is able to use the details in her story when she needs them. A good thing to think is: where is this happening?