I am ten days into my new yearlong project: storyaday.
Today I met with some other writers who wanted a chance to write in a fun/inspired setting.
My friend Kate has a deck of cards with a lot of random words on it. You can use it for a game, or instead, as she likes to do, you can pick 3 cards at random and then create a few paragraphs of a story using those three words.
After we finished writing we would read what we wrote out loud. I haven’t heard feedback on my writing since Spring 2011 which was my final semester at UMW. It was refreshing, if a little nerve wracking, to read my work out loud and hear other people’s comments.
I found it interesting to see my friend’s different writing styles. I tend to lean towards more fantastical and magical settings, but my friend Kate has a really fluid style that I think adapts to both the surreal and also the realistic. My other friend Erica tended to write about relationships, especially that concerning the topic of family/romance drama.
One of my weaker areas of writing that I want to focus on this project is that of description. I find myself writing more action and dialogue than description.
In general when I read I like to read books with minimal description. One of the reasons why I am not the biggest fan of reading the Lord of the Rings books is because Tolkien goes on and on describing EVERY leaf and every tree in the story. I don’t need to read 50 words describing one object. I am content with something as simple as, “He walked past a tree.”
Today I made more of a conscious effort to include description in my writing. —->
Story of the day:
Temptation (words: lush, crest, hear)
The crest of the hill was just with in her reach, but she was too bedazzled by the sight of the lush flowers that lined the hill’s pathway. She felt tempted by the exotic aroma that emanated from the golden flowers. They smelled like honey and strawberries. And the color of the flowers! Never in her life had she seen a color so vivid.
She vaguely remembered there was a reason she was supposed to ignore the flowers along this path. Something she had heard from her mother…? Or grandfather? She couldn’t remember.
Just one whiff she thought. I just want to hold it up to my nose and smell it. She stepped off the path and reached out with her hand to touch the closest flower. She expected it to feel silken to the touch, but instead she felt sharp needles sink into her flesh.
She started to scream…..