Set your timer to 10 minutes and start writing. Your opening sentence should be "She never told me she couldn't swim..."
Remember you can write in any style or format. When you are finished cut and paste your 10 min piece in the comment thread below OR put a link to your own blog or area where you write online.
Here's my entry:
ReplyDeleteI never told her I couldn't swim either. So there we are on one of those ridiculous swan pedal boats out in the middle of the lake when suddenly the wind picked up. The wind is batting us around and the stupid swan head is going left to right, right to left like an upside down metronome. Water is splashing over the sill and onto the floor of the boat. Our soaked feet are struggling to push the pedals and get us back to shore, but the side-to-side motion is making it hard for us to go forward. Meanwhile, all I’m thinking is that the boat is going to tip over and me and her are going to drown and the headline is going to say “Dumb ass couple on first date drown in swan boat tipping accident”. She’s grabbed hold of me, her wet hair sticking to my face and shoulders and through the terror I notice that it smells really nice.
love the metronome imagery!
DeleteShe never told me she couldn’t swim. Show, don’t tell, as the old adage goes. And Annie was a bear when she got her adage on.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, she didn’t tell me she couldn’t swim, she decided to show me instead — a little writing lesson that cost her her life. But her ending of her life was as vivid as her living of it, so in that sense it was worth it, one might say. Or one might just as easily say it was ridiculous waste. Stupid. And I suspect one might be equally correct either way.
“Look,” she shouted, perched on the edge of our bluff, overlooking the withering waves of Lake Annie (it was called something else then; the county changed the name to honor her after my novel’s enormous success started to bring in tourist dollars, although the locals started to complain after a few of the visitors leapt to their deaths, followed by hundreds more, and demanded that guardrails be installed; those didn’t work ((people just climbed over, surprise surprise)) so they built a huge chain-link fence, which visitors complained spoiled both the view and their sad memories of the glum imaginary world of the novel and started to stay away in droves, taking their glum money with them, so the county took it down and replaced it with a plexiglass window extending for hundreds of meters on either side of the Actual Fictional Death Leap Spot of Annie Protagonist of the Famous Novel; people still whined about how the new Clear Wall still spoiled the experience, maybe blocking the wind that blew realistically off the lake or something, but let’s be honest here, don’t we all suspect that most of the visitors came hoping to be around when one of the fans of the novel got overwhelmed by fiction grief and got all — for want of a better word — “plummet-y”?).
“It’s easy!” and down she went.
Nice. love "glum money." What's with the place-holder words? I hadn't seen you do that before. New technique?
DeleteM, thank you very much for you kind comments. what's a place-holder word?
DeleteAnnie Protagonist, Famous Novel, etc. Not an uncommon thing. Just hadn't noticed you do it before.
DeleteShort as usual!
ReplyDeleteShe never told me she couldn't swim.
It was a long way to the bottom, but although her feet rested there she never felt it. She never felt the oil green ribbons wrap around her ankles as her still convulsing body sent the dirt to swirl around her body in short lived eddies. She never noticed as the hours passed the tiny crabs and minnows moved closer and closer to finally take bits of flesh with skittish dashes before settling in for a feast.
I guess neither of us felt it. I never told her I couldn't swim either.
Ooh, what's going on here, double suicide? vivid images -- oil green ribbons, swirling dirt, the skittish dashes. And "short-lived eddies" mirrors the tragedy of the act? Perhaps?
DeleteOf course! You know I'm a professional symbolism user! I didn't loathe every god-forsaken minute of Lord of the Flies discussions at all. haha! I guess it could be a double suicide. I was just picturing two dumb asses on a boat not thinking ahead.
DeleteI posted mine to my blog. You can read it here: http://ramblesofasquigglesmurf.wordpress.com/2014/08/15/freshwriting-ididntknow/
ReplyDelete