The Mirror Exercise
A revision insight into cause and effect in your narrative.
The Mirror Exercise involves simply rewriting a scene from the opposite emotional register. It’s a hypothesis that asks, what happens when you flip the emotional state of a scene so that joy becomes ominous or a breakup becomes hilarious?
When I suggest writers do this, it’s usually not to technically improve a scene or moment in a narrative, but to find out what’s actually going on. And it’s a good way to discover if the version writers think they are writing, and the version down on the page are, in fact, the same thing. (Yes, this is surprisingly often not the same thing.)
The mirror exercise can also help writers who might be polishing until everything feels fine, perfectly fine, but maybe too perfect, i.e. too emotionally flat.
Flipping the register forces the writer to touch the underlying stakes or feelings they’ve been polishing around, especially in drafts that are “fine” but oddly airless.
How to Do The Mirror Exercise
Choose a scene, stanza, or passage (one with a clear emotional tone).
Identify the existing emotion. Is it joyful? Sad? Angry? Peaceful?
Flip it. Rewrite the scene from the opposite emotional state. If it’s a lighthearted memory, make it ominous. If it’s grief, try absurdity. And so on.
Add concrete images to support the mood: for example, it could be an object like a mosquito coil smoking on the porch, a plastic plate flexing in your hand, a porch light buzzing, or somebody’s knee bouncing up and down.
Notice what shifts. What gets sharper? What does the flipped version reveal about the real fear, desire, or anger of the narrator or a character?
Things You Might Discover
A joyful childhood scene rewritten as unsettling often reveals what the narrator didn’t have language for at the time. And a breakup scene rewritten with humour could uncover denial or the depths of resilience. Whatever the flip, this “wrong” version could show you what else is there in this moment and material, hidden under the current emotional temperature of your piece.
Example
Original: “We sat on the porch devouring strawberries, the juice running down our chins, summer stretching endlessly before us.”
Mirror version: “We sat on the front porch eating strawberries off a slick plastic plate. The light buzzed, and the little green mosquito coiled, smoking the air like a warning. Nobody said what we were all thinking.”
A reminder that you don’t have to like or keep the flipped version! It really is an experiment to see what happens. (Though sometimes you might find the flip is just what your piece needed.)
The most important part of this exercise is to pay attention to the one thought or line that pops out at you, one you didn’t know was there until you went through the mirror.
Warmly,
Rachel
Great exercise!