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:
- I am caffeine deprived
- I can afford to buy luxuries such as a three pound cup of coffee
- 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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