Thursday, 13 September 2012

Flex, stretch, write!

So, in my quest to improve as a writer I am currently reading and working through The Creative Writing Coursebook (Edited by Julia Bell & Paul Magrs, Macmillan, 2001)

The great thing about this book - designed to instruct and inspire your creative writing - is that it is a collection of anecdotes and essays by forty bona fide authors, so you really get into the mind-set of how other writers approach their own writing.

I’m finding the writing exercises really helpful, not only because they allow you to ‘start’ something but also they present a challenge. Here’s an example; Look around the room and settle upon an object, it can be anything, I chose my coffee cup. Then you have to describe the item in detail letting your mind wander and keep pulling it back to the item, creating two pages of free prose. You are not to edit it as you write so it should be a little rough and ready with a few glimmers of 'voice' appearing in the mix. Raw material to revisit and reshape. My attempt:

‘A Starbucks coffee mug bought as a gift from my mother who knows next to nothing about me other that I like coffee. I like the way coffee revives me, like now in the early hours of Saturday morning, the taste coating my tongue and the smell of it beginning to fill the living room. Coffee for me goes hand-in-hand with waking. Drinking it is as simple as breathing although sometimes my eagerness to drink it leaves a burn upon the roof of my mouth that stings like the sharp intake of air after crying.
The mug is long, as in tall. It is white with red inside - like innards or guts. The mug is bleeding inwardly but outside it is a perfect white marred only by the coffee dribble imprint on the rim that my gulping mouth has made.

The handle is stripped white and red like candy cane and now that I came to think of it there is a festive feel to the design, it may have come into my life at Christmas. The mug may have expected to be filled with spiced coffees full of nutmeg and cinnamon instead of the instant jars of coffee that I buy. I’m not sure that I would buy such tacky synthetic coffee’s to drink – I prefer my branded instant caffeine drunk in a cheap faux festive cup branded with the insignia of the corporate giant that harvests beans in some far off place and makes them into addictive beverages marked-up and held aloft on the way to work as a status symbol.

These days the disposable Starbucks clutched in the hand of a twenty-something sends a message: 
  1. I am caffeine deprived 
  2. I can afford to buy luxuries such as a three pound cup of coffee 
  3. I am: tall, skinny latte, extra foam, with a shot of caramel syrup - Nice to meet you. 
No doubt the girl with the Starbucks, her hand silently sweating against its incredible heat, will be trying hard to cover the miss-spelt version of the name she was allocated at birth. Something like ‘Stefni’ or ‘Leeeyah’.

The coffee mug carries as image on it – a mermaid, white on green. Her hair falls in stripes and waves down her front, covering her bland nudity; she wears a crown with a star at its centre. I can’t see her arms or hands only two tails or fins on either side encasing her in scales. Miss Starbucks has a passive smile, her eyes appear half closed perhaps in the pleasurable state of one who is awaking with a morning coffee and has just taken her first sip. Do mermaids secretly like coffee then? Do they wait for the Starbucks shipment to run aground and purge its load into the salty world they inhabit? Starbucks is an even more irresponsible company than I thought! Getting mermaids hooked on java.’ 

© CT, 2012.

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