Writing Exercises

Chad and I have started a fun new story-telling game. And it's his idea.

He's always been one for writing stories and then sharing, whereas I like to write mine down and then hide them away and never let them see the light of day. Ever. I am getting better about sharing, though-- thank goodness for blogfests!

The winners.

Anyway, our last card game got a bit wearing, so we broke out our In A Pickle set, only to discover that we'd never opened it. Oops! Chad's idea was that each card should relate to all the others in the stack as we went along, so the entire string would make a story when we finished. (If you've never played the game: Each card has a word on it, and you make strings of words with your cards and each word has to fit into the word on top of it. The object is to get the "biggest" thing possible, and they don't normally have to make sense as a group. For example, Clown => Solar System => Dictionary, because a clown can be in the Solar System but "solar system" is in the dictionary.) At the end, we each choose our favourite string of words and use them to write a story, with the idea being that we didn't have to use the words in the exact order, so long as they were all in there and we could tell the story in less than 200 words.

So, with his permission, here is Chad's story:

Confessions of a thief: I was a young man when I saw the film that changed my life forever. There was an expedition and deep in the ice they found a cave, which they called "the whale," because that is how it was shaped. The place they warmed themselves melted the ice enough that a puddle formed and in that puddle they discovered an encyclopedia and only a few entries could be read. The one that caught my attention was a castle with a framed phone book and a grand piano. The time period was completely wrong. I began my search for this castle and these things which belonged to one 'Doctor.' That is all I have ever found and now as I lie here awaiting death to take me, one question burns in my mind: Doctor who?

And here is mine:

 The nun shook her head as she walked to the convent laundry to take the bedding out of the dryer. Her young students had been perplexed over the saying, “to have one’s heart in one’s mouth.” The expression had appeared in the paper that very morning as the English equivalent of something France's president had said the day before when her young child had fallen down the stairs and landed on his head. Why this should be newsworthy, Sister Agathe wasn’t sure, but she was sure that it was her job to educate these young pupils in her charge and had at once set them to looking through the dictionary to discover the meaning to this idiom. After 10 minutes of searching, they were no closer to understanding, so Sister had given in and explained it very carefully. Even now, she wasn’t sure that the students had taken in the meaning of the expression.
“They don’t seem to teach the young anything nowadays,” she murmured as she folded the sheets.

Obviously, neither one is wonderful. But it was a fun little challenge, so we're going to keep doing it just to keep our minds sharp.

What is your favourite writing exercise?