Blog: A Virtual Writing Marathon for Our Virtual Community

This past Saturday, I worked with a fellow Fordham English major to host a virtual creative writing marathon, loosely following the instructions laid out in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones.

This event was intended, in part, as a replacement for the creative writing retreat we had planned to host on campus. I had been working to develop this event for months and, alongside a large portion of Fordham’s creative writing concentrators had been looking forward to a day of community and creativity. Its cancellation was a major blow, but with Goldberg’s guidance, we were able to retool the free-writing time as a Zoom event, hosted by yours truly.

We opened with brief introductions, including a word or two about how we each were feeling. The cancellation of classes has left many members of the English department community feeling disappointed and uncertain, and our marathon participants were understandably tired and anxious. Once the writing began, we kicked off each round with an optional prompt from this helpful first line generator. Then we wrote for increasing intervals — two ten-minute sessions, followed by two fifteen-minute sessions, followed by two twenty-minute sessions. In between, we encouraged writers to share their work, and, as Goldberg recommends, we allowed them to speak without weighing in ourselves.

While some of us wrote with old-fashioned pen and paper, others used the Most Dangerous Writing App, which was introduced to us by one of our professors. It's great for forcing yourself to write without self-critiquing and slowing down along the way. 

These two hours passed quickly and productively. We closed with another word about how we were feeling (“collected,“ “calm,“ and “accomplished“ was the dominating sentiment), and I solicited advice for future writing marathons. Overall, it was a total success, and we hope to hold another in the near future!

Personally, I spent the entirety of the time writing on the very first prompt. I’ve had Allende’s The House of the Spirits on the brain lately, which I think was reflected in the opening paragraphs of my work. Here’s my first attempt at writing for a marathon:

She’d always known her great Aunt Helen was odd. Helen had an incurable habit of disappearing for months at a time and suddenly reappearing without warning and with strange knickknacks — kettles that whistled Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah and journals that made ink disappear and stuffed animals that breathed and blinked and sometimes, when you weren’t looking, moved rooms.

Ellie wouldn’t have been surprised to find any of those things behind the strange door. In fact, she had steeled herself to find all that and more on her first visit to her great aunt’s house.

What she hadn’t been prepared to find was the room overflowing with mirrors, each haphazardly draped with a tarp.

The first question that sprang to mind was whether the tarps were protecting the mirrors, or the onlooker.