I recently purchased a book called The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction by Brian Kiteley. Today, I completed Exercise #2, “Imperative.” Here’s the core of the prompt:
“Write a fragment of a story that is made up entirely of imperative commands: Do this; do that; contemplate the rear end of the woman who is walking out of your life. This exercise will be a sort of second-person narration (a you is implied in the imperative).”
500 words
I recently purchased a book called The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises That Transform Your Fiction by Brian Kiteley. Today, I completed Exercise #1, “The Reluctant I.” Here’s the core of the prompt:
“Write a first person story in which you use the first person pronoun (I or me or my) only two times–but keep the I somehow important to the narrative you’re constructing. The point of this exercise is to imagine a narrator who is less interested in himself than in what he is observing.”
600 words
I became a Charlottean shortly after I learned how to walk. It was preceded by a two-day drive across the country’s flat middle, which was preceded by my mother dropping an armful of groceries in a Walmart parking lot in Omaha, Nebraska. It was punishingly cold. Plastic bags scudded across the asphalt like arctic tumbleweeds, and my mother looked at my brother’s and my ruddy little faces, thought about her lifetime of North Carolina summers, and knew she had to go back. Continue reading
We swell like crops, then blue
———and toughen to marble
——————till the maggots come.
Ravens start with eye-morsels, swallowing everything.
———They slurp sunsets and children on bikes, Continue reading
hunky wedges for a finish that’s casually bold.” While it was an excellent first job and I was grateful to have it, the monotony was often maddening. Continue reading
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