The Rock Exercise
Purpose:
To introduce students in the first days of a writing course to some of its central themes, including the need to suspend judgment, observe closely, revise, collaborate, and make the familiar strange. Also useful as a means of getting students to focus on their own performance on the first day of class, not yours
Time required: 30 to 40 minutes
Materials: Four or five non-descript rocks, newsprint, markers
Steps
Organize the class into groups of four or five students. Explain that you will be providing each group with a sheet of newsprint and marker. Their first task is to choose a recorder.
While distributing one rock to each group, explain that you will be giving each group "a very familiar object." Their task for the next fifteen minutes is to generate a list of observations of this object, and record them on the newsprint. Encourage them to go beyond the obvious. You might suggest that they pass the rock around the group, and when each group member gets it they should offer an observation. Keep the rock moving from hand to hand.
As the lists grow, encourage the groups to look even more closely.
After fifteen minutes or so, stop the groups. Ask them to review their newsprint lists. Their next task is to circle the most obvious observation and the most interesting or unusual observation.
Go around the room and have each group share these circled items. There will be much laughter. This should be fun.
Discussion
The opening question is simple: what does this silly exercise have to do with a writing class? Students won’t have any trouble answering this question initially, but they generally fail to recognize the rich implications of the exercise. A good question to start this deeper analysis is to ask whether the class saw any pattern in the location on the lists of the most obvious and least obvious items. (Generally speaking, the most obvious observations are the initial ones, the most interesting occurs later). The obvious lesson: the closer you look the more you see. Other points that might emerge in the discussion include,
Revision requires just such "re-seeing." A writer must be willing to see what he has seen before in a way that he hasn’t seen it. How is this accomplished? How was it accomplished in this exercise?
In order to do this exercise, students had to go beyond initial perceptions ("it’s just a rock"), suspend judgment, and play. Writers must be willing to avoid closing off inquiry too soon or they may feel to see the unfamiliar in the familiar.
Collaboration can enrich the process of invention, and help others to break with their initial prejudices or perceptions. Workshop groups, when they are successful, can do similar things.
Most writing topics are like these rocksfairly commonplace. Everything has pretty much been written about. The challenge is not to find a dramatic and unusual topic save that for your dissertation but to create a process that allows you to see what is surprising or interesting in what is familiar.
Bruce Ballenger, Boise State University 2001