Today, I decided to model a creative writing exercise, designed to combat the infamouse writer’s block. So, I used a random word generator to come up with eight disparate words.
Here are my words: entice, bribe, soothe, tawdry, furious, ice-cream, glasses, cake
In this exercise, there will be a time limit of about 10 to 15 minutes. I am going to go with a ten-minute time limit, but you could feel free to use a little more time. Just don’t give yourself unlimited time because that permits that annoying voice of negativity to gain control and to tell you that you are not creative/a writer, etc. Even worse, that annoying voice of negativity will tell you that “you can’t.”
What I’m going to do is to use the first word (entice) in the first sentence and then, use the rest of the words in random places in the story.
When you write your story, I want you to be free of all expectations. You are not writing a masterpiece. In fact, it doesn’t even have to make sense. The goal is to have that annoying voice of negativity turned off. Basically, it’s a way to get past writer’s block. If you have to write something and you’re struggling to write, stopping and switching to this sort of exercise could work.
So, now, I am going to set a timer on my phone for ten minutes, and I’m going to start writing…
Here goes…
One day, I decided to entice some of my friends to visit me by offering them a cake. A very fancy, nicely decorated cake, not just something that I could bake, which usually bordered on inedible. My lack of baking skill has been a joke among my friends and family. It all stems from my strong desire to be very, very creative. Which means that I use random amounts of ingredients or I leave the ingredients out altogether for no reason, other than a whim.
That doesn’t work very well in baking. The cakes fall or they taste and look grotesque. Some people say that these cakes look like they came from a tawdry little bakery, where the cakes are bad, but they’re lavishly decorated. Oh, yeah, should I mention that the lavish decorations are also impressively inedible?
Well, at any rate, I actually went to this cute little bakery, where the cakes are always delicious, and I purchased a cake. Then, I went to a store and bought a bunch of nice glasses, so we could enjoy a beverage with our cake. I bought some sort of sparkling water. Later, when I actually served the cake and the sparking water, people were complaining because they expected that I would pour wine in the wine glasses, not sparking water. What the heck? I thought that wine glasses had stems and these, clearly, did not. I was told that stemless glasses were a thing. My friends were actually furious about drinking sparkling water from stemless wine glasses. Fortunately, they didn’t throw the glasses against the wall, as they had threatened to do.
What strange friends I have who would throw glasses full of sparking water against the wall. It does seem impressively rude.
They were okay with the ice cream that I offered them. It was some random flavor that I picked up. I didn’t even pay attention to the flavor when I bought it because, once again, my mad desire for creativity meant that everything could be random, including the ice cream flavor. Unfortunately, the ice cream was some sort of coffee flavor, which I discovered, much to my great sadness, was completely inedible. I had to bribe someone to finish my ice cream because it was partially melted by that point, but some coffee fiend was so eager to have coffee in any form that they ate what remained of my ice cream, which was most of it. I only took one bite of that bitter disaster…
(whoops, time’s up)
That was fun! When you do your creative writing exercise, you could use my words or you could get a set of eight words randomly generated for you. Here is the website for the random words exercise: https://writingexercises.co.uk/random-words-exercises.php
See you tomorrow, when I will have a blog post about… something…
