Hey there kids!
Below is today’s effort, and as always there is a little something for you embedded within the picture above.
Have a seriously grand weekend, and my best to one and all.
Hamish xxx
WRITING EXERCISE
There are four parts to this exercise:
Step One
Describe the room you are in
Write for two minutes.
Step Two
Now imagine that there is a dinner party going on in the room and someone you know just walked through the door. Take your mind’s eye to that person and describe them and what they are doing with bricks of detail.
Write for two minutes
Step Three
Now take your mind’s eye out of the room, outside of the building you are in and describe what you imagine is going on outside using bricks of detail. The sky, the streets, the cars, etc.
Write for two minutes
Step Four
Bring your mind’s eye back into the room and the person you knew who walked in. They are having a coughing fit. You can let them choke or you can save them, it’s up to you. Just describe what happens using bricks of detail.
Write for two minutes
AFTER WRITING
We use this exercise to demonstrate how powerful writing with detail is. It also shows that by cutting from one detailed description to the next, (the room, the person walking in, outside, the coughing) a story starts to evolve.
Please pick no more than 550 words from this exercise and post it on your Writers’ Board
Call it Coughing Fit
Here it is, all that I penned in accordance to the stipulated.
Week Two – Coughing fit – 20MAR15
Walls the colour of melted vanilla ice cream stretch three and a half metres upward around me; four sides four metres by five metres apart and long. The 1950’s ceiling is the white of a young brides wedding dress, cobwebs are a smattering in the North West corner. Thankfully well passed their used by date.
Once loved, now in need of polish, the jarrah floor boards beneath my feet are uniform in size, but under closer inspection are not in colour.
My room, this room, a Beale upright piano cowers in a corner; banjos, mandolins, and guitars are scattered around all four sides. Practically, not aesthetically arrayed.
Red hair, skin the colour of cream and a quizzical gaze cover her thirty something year old face. She is dressed appropriate to the evening; again, more in line with the practical than to impress. An ankle length heavy chocolate coloured cotton skirt ends where it is meant to, and the toes of a well-loved pair of brogues escape the skirts shadow. Her cream blouse sets off the green of her eyes, eyes of both mischief and intellect. She seats herself in the fold of a laughing throng; wine glass magically fills her hand.
Outside now, and the shaggy green lawn is picked out with a riot of colour, even by night under the light of the veranda, the flower seeds randomly cast among the grass when planted, now singing the majesty of the night.
Such a sky looms above us. Moonless and black, stars bright and high; the chill of a late southerly teases all within it, and purple children play within a mulberry tree near enough for us to hear, yet distant enough to remain unseen. Bats sweep and swoop beneath the heavens; moths their prey, the feature on this nights celestial menu. The scent of frangipani and rose assail the olfactory, and her body sways against my own, Madeleine Peyroux proving music to be the sound of emotion.
Seated close, her green eyes enthral me; they are laughter personified those eyes. I make some light hearted quip, and with her wine glass at her lip, she inhales whatever white had been filling her glass as she laughs.
Struggling to regain composure, she has the attention of all others seated at this, my, table; she attempts to regain and compose herself, yet still laughing at my wit and her folly, she places the guilty glass before herself, the damask soaks up a stray drop, and she reaches for a dainty handkerchief within her bra. In a single move she is on her feet, coughing still, supressing a snort, eyes blaze still with the humour of it. Portraying Galahad, I offer her a glass of water. She accepts, and in an unlikely manner, her coughing subsides, the inhabitants at my table cheer, and she and I, we, move to the veranda again, for air?
Click the picture at the top.
H
Fin
The World Turned Upside Down 
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