Month: November 2018

Choose One Sentence for Inspiration

Choose One Sentence for Inspiration

Posted on by Tessa Adams

Hey, writers! At a recent family gathering, a beautifully creative relative and I were discussing writing projects we’d done in the past. She mentioned having written an entire screenplay from one sentence given to her by a colleague. I have also felt inspired to create work based on an idea or a word. And this got me thinking: Sometimes we feel so much pressure to create something amazing, that we clog our meaning with a whole bunch of extra. Writing should be crisp and clean, allowing for gorgeous ideas to explode through the page.

Writing exercises that help me the most are those that provide a word or a sentence to incorporate. I attach myself to a phrase I’ve read or heard, and I let the idea bloom into something original and new. My story, The Hunger, came from reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and my flash fiction piece, Revolutions, came from a news headline I heard one summer.

Here are ten sentences. Choose one to incorporate at the beginning, middle, or end of your short story, flash fiction, poem, blog, screenplay, or memoir today.

Ten Sentences for Story Ideas

  1. Nights like this one take a hold and never let go.
  2. Her innocence was hypnotic.
  3. His eyes told stories his lips would never express.
  4. To be fully understood was a feeling like no other.
  5. His voice was rough like tree bark, and she had never heard anything more beautiful.
  6. Red, green, yellow on repeat was all she could focus on from the diner window.
  7. Desire was a funny word.
  8. It only took one pen to do a lifetime’s worth of damage.
  9. There, on the bed, she slept so soundly.
  10. Sarcasm is known as the biting of the skin.

If you use one, I’d love to read your finished piece. Send them to me at awriterinside16@gmail.com. Happy writing, friends.

Writing Paradox: Two Faces of Description

Writing Paradox: Two Faces of Description

Posted on by Tessa Adams

Now that you have played with sensory description in a snack-sized way, it’s time for your assignment #3. Paradox.

Two Faces/Paradoxical Description

Appearances can be deceiving. Think of a place that evokes incredible emotion from you. These can be positive or negative feelings. Give about a paragraph’s worth of attention to describing this place using all of the senses. Now, read over your description. Is this truthful? Is this positive or negative? Whatever your answer, write another paragraph describing what’s hidden underneath. What do people not always see? Dig deeper and describe the other view. Here is an example from the book The Paris Wife, by Paula Mclain. Hadley Hemingway is describing a market in Paris:

When Ernest worked, I kept house for us, making the bed, sweeping and dusting and washing up the breakfast dishes. In the late morning, I’d take a market basket into the street and do our shopping, hunting for the best bargains. Even though it was on the Right Ban of the Seine and nowhere near our apartment, I liked to walk to Les Halles, the open air market was known as the Stomach of Paris. I loved the maze of stalls and stands with offerings more exotic than anything I’d ever seen back home. There was all manner of game, venison, and boar and pyramids of soft, limp hares. Everything was displayed naturally, hooves and tusks and fur left intact so you knew just what you were looking at. Although it was disconcerting to know these creatures had recently been up and running in the nearby fields and farms, there was something almost beautiful in the sheer volume and variety of things on display, all edible in some form. I didn’t half know what to do with most of it-unplucked pheasant and goose, or the baskets of small tri-colored birds I couldn’t even identify-but I loved to look before gravitating toward the vegetable and fruit stalls. I always stayed much longer than I needed to, walking and admiring the bushels of leeks and parsnips, oranges and figs and thick-skinned apples. Pg. 78. 

As opposed to the alleyway of this same market:

But in the alleyways behind the marketplace, fruit and meat rotted in creates. Rats crawled; pigeons crowded and pecked each other savagely, trailing feathers and lice. This was a reality and though living with Ernest was giving me more tolerance for the real than ever before, it made me feel sick even so. It was like looking into the gutters at the Place de la Contrescarpe, where colored dyes ran freely from the flower vendors’ carts: brief false lushness, and ugliness underneath. What had Ernest said way back when in Chicago? “Love is a beautiful liar?” Beauty was a liar, too. When I saw the rats the first time, I wanted to drop my basket where it was and run away, but we weren’t rich enough for symbolic gestures. So I walked. (pg. 78)

Now it’s your turn. Where in your life are you faced with a place that is seemingly horrible, but if you looked REALLY looked, you could find beauty? What about flipping that scenario? What scene is just absolutely gorgeous and fulfilling from the outside, but behind the scenes, it is an ugly alleyway? Describe its two faces in two separate paragraphs.