Young Writers Society

I was taught this exercise by a friend of mine who is really into script writing and what you do is take a story and either shrink it or stretch while still telling the same story. You could even break it down to one word like lust, envy, or hunger. You can also do it in the opposite direction and do what my soph English teacher called slowing down the moment and adding detail in. Just take any story you want and just stretch and compress it.

By doing this you learn to be short and concise with your words, and also to make vivid mind melting descriptions and have an eye for details. For me personally shrinking my storys has always helped me figure out what my story is really about and what it all boils down to. Hope you found this helpful

This should probably be moved to Writing Tips.

It is in writing tips. or so the site tells me

This is genius! = D

I haven't used this technique before so I decided to play around with it and found some really good uses of stretching things out and smushing them back together (repeatedly.)

1) Description
Rather than being strict and consise to start off with, knowing that I was going to chop most of this anyway I played around with description a lot more. I lengthened it out to fill in as many details I could. Then I condensed it again to chop out the redundant ones, and stretched out the descriptions of the key features. What I had was something simpler, more vivid, that took less agony to produce.

2) Plotting
I deviated here and didn't keep the same story. I scribbled out a detailed movie plot, then condensed it to the key elements, and stretched it out again but as if I was adding to a bare plot rather than recreating the one I originally had in mind. I cut it down again so that some of the first plot got lost and my new plot added in, and when I stretched it out again I had something completely different from the first, and with ideas that I wouldn't otherwise have thought of.

3) World building
It's so easy to info dump, especially since I usually have an entire world built in my head before I put pen to paper and then don't know where to start. So I scribbled down as much as I wanted, then chopped out all the things that I thought were important but could be done without. Then I extended the important parts and scribbled down lots about them, and cut out all the technicalities so that what I ended up with was something less infodumpish and much more reader friendly.

Agreed, it takes time to stretch and smush things over and over, but! I think when you have writers block and an empty head, taking a movie plot or phrase and stretching or shrinking it would be a nice way to promt the muse back into action.

Also, with the hours spend vegetablising in front of the computer screen waiting for that brief moment of passion to reignite my interest in my project, doing this is simple and easy, and it's better doing that than nothing.

Thanks for the tip!

You are welcome! I only wish I had more tips of equal value