DanBailey.net cyclist, writer, font designer, geek

Exercise Six

Source: Can't remember where I found it, but the exercise is to list ten random material nouns and ten random immaterial nouns. Then, connect one of each using "of" to create a series of interesting descriptions to use in a sentence.

Material Nouns: calendar, photograph, bolt, bottle, platter, book, microphone, wire, frame, sword

Immaterial Nouns: rage, honesty, happiness, childhood, angst, justice, obscurity, humility, poverty, envy

Connections:
calendar of rage
photograph of humility
bolt of happiness
bottle of honesty
platter of justice
book of childhood
microphone of envy
wire of angst
frame of obscurity
sword of poverty

Sentences:

• Another day, another slight that hammered at his already-damaged self-confidence, and though he didn't know it consciously, Jim had noted it on his calendar of rage, an overflowing and heavily annotated document.

• The monk was a photograph of humility -- not one aspect of the man spoke of pride.

• The most disturbing aspect of her depression wasn't the crushing weight of life that bore down on her, but the occasional bolt of happiness that would come at odd moments when everything around her seemed dull and without life.

• It was years before Mike could drink from the bottle of honesty and be refreshed by what he found within.

• The doctor had been served a meal upon the platter of justice and found the menu bitter.

• The book of childhood has a plot that is very linear -- you are born, you grow old -- but the genre really determines the elements in between those two points.

• Gazing upon his neighbor's life, a little voice in the back of his head stepped up to the microphone of envy and began yelling loudly, addressing the crowd of one.

• The teenage years are characterized by a low-current wire of angst running into your brain with a low hum, and it runs twenty-four hours a day.

• Sam's life was lived within a frame of obscurity -- typical job, typical marriage, typical house in the suburbs -- and the picture within was colorless and without merit.

• Painful and slow-healing are the wounds wrought by the sword of poverty.

Exercise Five

Source: Writing Forward. Take an original paragraph you've written and cut everything you can without losing the original meaning of the work.

Original:

Exhaustion of the deep, bone-weary variety has a unique way of numbing an emotional response. The trio -- Addy, Khalid, and Markus -- had watched the supply hopper come in through the dust storm, it's drive flaring brightly enough to provide some light. When the exhaust plume went parallel to the ground, momentarily, and then inverted, they had enough energy to crouch as low as their pressure suits would allow. The hard whump of exploding fuel tanks rattled through their feet, and debris, mostly their provisions for the rest of the climb, rained down around them.

Edited:

Exhaustion of the bone-weary variety has a way of numbing emotional response. The trio had watched the supply hopper come in, it's drive flaring brightly enough to provide some light. When the exhaust plume went parallel to the ground and then inverted, they had enough energy to crouch as low as their pressure suits would allow. The exploding fuel tanks rattled their feet, and debris rained down around them.

Exercise Four

Source: Writing Forward. Write one sentence that is at least 100 words long. Then, rewrite that sentence in 10 words or less.

Part One:

A truth: getting shot and living is akin to being born and John knows that because he's living through it all over again from the moment of the bullet's impact into the chest plate of his body armor to the completion of his crumpling into a pile on the street, he is only aware of a searing light, new sensations -- his tongue is sharp and copper-plated, his extremities seem to bulge with the shockwave, and there is a crackling in his ears as broken bones grind -- and worst of all is the godawful shame, the indignity of the whole clusterfuck.

Rewrite:

John's rebirth is all pain and indignity, bullet-induced labor.

Exercise 3

This exercise is to write a fragment of a story (500 words) written entirely in imperative commands. Source: 3 AM Epiphany

Here we go:

Exercise 2

This exercise is to write a 600 word short story from the first person POV, using a personal pronoun only twice. Source: 3 AM Epiphany

Here's my take:

Exercise 1

So I'm counting this as a writing exercise since I blew it out in about 10 minutes. BoingBoing is having a 100-word fiction contest. The theme is "Found in Space." My first draft was 122 words. I really had to work to get it down to 100. Here's my results:

Not brilliant, but okay.