Monday writing group

Here’s what I wrote at our writing group on Monday. Just in case anyone who isn’t part of the group should happen to read this, we meet every few weeks to discuss writing and our various projects, and just to write. This week we tried out some exercises and games from Jamie Cat Callan’s ‘The Writer’s Toolbox’, which Chad and Michelle gave me for my birthday.

Exercise 1
First, we used randomly selected prompts from the toolbox as opening lines, non-sequitur turning points and phrases to be incorporated into endings, writing for about five minutes per section. Here are my (unedited) results – Callan’s prompts are italicised, the rest is mine:

He swore on his mother’s grave, but he swore on just about everything. Swearing was like an anchor for him – a weight he plunged into the waves of uncertainty, hoping it would reach some solid ground and still the meandering of his doubting mind. There was not, however, anything solid enough to hold such a wandering organ as was his mind – and so his oaths were scattered on the tides, as shallow as lies.

It wasn’t so much that I had been blind to the truth. It was just that I had seen the truth differently. If his lies were shallow, mine were deep – far deeper that the grave that held his mother, deeper than the seas of his doubt. Deep enough to believe; and if you believe it, a lie is the same as truth, as far as you experience it. So – true or not, sworn upon or merely accepted – our truth was that we were brothers.

The thing she did to the brakes on the Honda was what made us realise it. When I say ‘she’, I don’t mean that poor woman down in the hole in the ground. I mean our sister, of course, the woman who stood between me and my fool of a brother, trying to anchor his weakness with strong words.

“I don’t care what happened to the brakes, or what the outcome of the investigation is,” he whispered, leaning toward us with tears slipping from beneath his sunglasses. “I swear, on her grave – that you’re our family, and we’ll stand by you.”

“Of course we will,” I said, squeezing her hand from the other side.

And I believed it.

Exercise 2
For this one, we selected three ‘Sixth Sense Cards’ and wrote for a few minutes on each. They were ‘pink fuzzy lint’, ‘the sound of Marcie’s feet’ and ‘the bad-smelling microwave’. Mine ended up linking together again, though that wasn’t a requirement.

Pink fuzzy lint stuck in the filter of the dryer; the lint is there but the sweater it came from is gone, and the woman who wore it is gone, and her breasts that looked so good snuggled up in that pink fuzz, they’re gone too. Bounced right out of my life and into some smooth-talking, guitar-playing sonofabitch’s pickup truck.

The sound of Marcie’s feet startle me as she pads up behind me.
“Whatcha lookin’ at, Daddy?” she says.
“Oh, just doin’ some laundry,” I tell her without turning around.
I shove the filer back in without pulling the fuzz off. It’s about all I’ve got left of Marcie’s mother.
There had been her costume jewellery, of course. When I heard about her and the guitar-man, I put all that into the microwave and pushed the ‘Defrost – Pizza’ button. It sparked and sputtered some. Didn’t do much to the jewellery but the microwave smells like burnt plastic every time I reheat a cup of coffee now.
She never came looking for the jewellery so I almost wrecked the microwave for nothing.

Exercise 3
We all chose different things for our last exercise, and I went back to the first one, with different random choices from the opening lines, non-sequiturs, and endings. This time I set off trying to be less linear and structured, but I think there’s an implied story anyway. Callan’s lines are italicised again.

Charlotte ate green peppers all day long
long
long
long
were the days
and the peppers were sweet and wet
spraying green droplets across her palette and her tongue
as she crushed morsels between her perfect teeth.
Pale green juice poured down her bright pink gums and across her hard white teeth
and danced tango on her tongue.

We were drinking champagne
and losing our shirts –
bubbles on our tongues
nipples in the breeze
boots to our behinds
as the credit crunch crashed down
like Charlotte’s teeth shredding the wealth springing from her pepper plants.

He did
what he did
what we couldn’t do
with all our expensive effervescence
frothing round our lips…
He made a shirt from newspaper
and a hat from a magazine
Charlotte read him like an open book
but in the end
she gave him peppers from her vine…