Writing Exercise #2: Write as much as you can on a random topic for five minutes...

Three attempts:

Garden furniture

Garden furniture comes in all shapes and sizes, like people. Some of it is very permanent, made of heavy wood and unmoving, screwed deep into the ground. Other items are light and temporary, like deckchairs which threaten to buckle under your weight. It can be fun to bring the inside of home into the new space of the garden, to get ants onto a nice rug, drop an ice-cream on a dining room chair that has been liberated onto the patio for an afternoon.

Does garden furniture secretly wish to be inside at night, once the sun has gone down and the family are safely ensconced into duvets and bedrooms where large wardrobes watch over them? Does garden furniture look around in the silent midnight hum of the garden and see insects and rodents and next-doors cat on the prowl and secretly wish it were a faithful chest of draws made of mahogany and holding a collection of miss-matched socks and baby photo’s?

Does the smell of soil and feline defecation get too much? Or is it happy to just be there for us on the four sunny days of the year when the rain holds off for just long enough so the family come together in the open air and stretch out on those trusty, slightly rusty, red deckchairs?

Eagles

Eagles frighten me. These aren’t sweet little birds that pop into the back garden for a bite of a worm basking itself in the sunshine, they are predatory, large and magnificent. The wing span of an eagle is truly terrifying – larger than a paraglider I’d imagine. Eagles soar in the air with a freedom that captures the imagination – especially that of the American people who supplant it into their national consciousness to represent strength and individualism. Eagles peer down from cliff-top roosts watching us tiny mortals; the size of ants. I wonder if they judge us, mock us with a dismissive flutter of feathers, if they playact ‘human’ to each other, smiling beaky disdain for Hank in his black SUV on a boiling day in the Canyons, listening to soft rock on his radio and wearing a baseball cap to cover his ever expanding bald patch – with a large eagle symbol emblazoned proudly upon it.

Fireworks

Fireworks remind me of the autumn – the smell of gunpowder and bonfires and the old ‘remember, remember’ rhyme. Do I remember my first firework show? There was a festival once where everyone stood around, freezing in the crisp early evening, waiting with a tired anticipation. The crowd was hushed, occasionally giving over into excited bursts of hysteria from children. The music looped to the greatest hits of Queen, everyone drinking a beer and buzzing with the celebratory feel to the air.

The moment the first one fizzes into the sky you are struck by several conflicting emotions: anticipation of the ‘big one’ the moment when a ten tonne firework will wreck the sky with its flaming aura; fear of the din of noise that is about to assault your senses; the sense of preserving your cool (you won’t ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ with the masses, it takes more than a firework to make you smile!). But, then before you know it you are swept away with the music and the spectacle before you, all of that beauty and terror merge into a feeling of elation. You experience a feeling of lifting up, of letting go, of your body exploding into the sky.

© CT, 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)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Creative-Writing-Coursebook-Exercises/dp/0333782259/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347547223&sr=8-1

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.