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Joined: 2/27/2011
Posts: 353
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Alrighty, here's some fun for the weekend! One of the exercises I used to do in my creative writing classes back in San Francisco was the Ten Word Challenge. Basically, I pick ten random words and you have to put them all into ONE PARAGRAPH that actually makes some sort of sense. (Hey, you're getting off easy here; when I ran writing exercises in a writing group, I made people write these things in fifteen minutes!)
So, here are your ten words:
expression
daylight
shadows
fate
pencil
puppet
lemon
rudimentary
sock
hedgehog
Ready to write your paragraphs? Leave them in the comments! And...GO!
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Joined: 3/16/2011
Posts: 279
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From the shadows stepped the sock puppet hedgehog. His expression was twisted, as if he had bitten into a sour lemon with his rudimentary sock mouth. Alas, Fate was not kind to this sock puppet. Even as he saw sunlight for the first time his arch nemesis the sock fox stabbed him in the eye with a pencil. As daylight faded the puppets were abandoned and their masters ran wailing for their mother.
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Joined: 3/7/2011
Posts: 38
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Lifted high into the brisk morning air, the dazed, sour expression on the hedgehog's face made him look as if he had sucked lemons for breakfast. He dangled, limp as a sock puppet, in the hands of the man who had wrestled him from the comfortable shadows of his burrow, blinking in the bright daylight. Excited voices babbled around him as his shadow was measured and recorded with a pencil in painstaking detail. Doomed to this fate of being mistaken for a groundhog every February, if he could talk, what he would say to the townspeople would be rudimentary.
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Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 376
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Starting at 943, not reading earlier entries yet.
The shadows were kinder to the old battered bum than daylight would have been. When he was coherent his expression betrayed his bleak outlook on life. Fortunately those moments were few and far between, as he never did more than pencil in bouts of sanity in his day planner. A rudimentary puppet, an old sweat sock with eyes drawn in with magic marker, was his conversational companion tonight. It was hard to watch him, harder still to listen to him; a constant reminder of how fate could even the mightiest to ruin. His mumbles were incoherent, but his partner's response was enunciated with eerie clarity, "You've got your hedgehog concept, you just got to stick with it. Lemon batteries, man. Replace the oil cartels with orchards, and get rid of the carbon dioxide in the air. Good to great, man, good to great! You've got tiger blood! You're a winner!"
OK. 954. Not sure if the idea I had came through though.
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Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 40
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Daylight cast shadows across the yard as the class waited in their seats. Of twelve children, few would be permitted to continue studying under The Master. Most could cast little more than a rudimentary spell: change a stick into a pencil or a bit of string into a sock. What would The Master ask of them?Perhaps animate a puppet for a few moments, or make a seed sprout. The children considered their fate with serious expressions, with the unfortunate exception of Hollis Hedgehog who chose instead to suck noisily on a lemon drop.
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Joined: 3/13/2011
Posts: 412
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Daylight waned as he puttered at his desk. Shadows grew longer and Daniel felt his fate closing in. It was a rudimentary assignment, to make a paragraph from ten words, ten measly words. He looked down at his paper, at those ten damnable words, an expression of disgust warring with a yawn on his face. Team building exercise, HA! Theresa had given this assignment to him, his team, to make them all dance like puppets from her strings. Doodling randomly on the paper, Daniel shoved a pencil into the half of a lemon sitting on his desk, waiting to be squeezed into his water. One by one, every pen and pencil in his pencil holder joined it, until it bristled, the rarely seen yellow skinned office hedgehog. His phone rang, and wearily he picked it up. He heard that familiar voice, and cut her off mid word. "Theresa, put a sock in it! I'll get it done when I get it done!"
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Joined: 3/11/2011
Posts: 6
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The hedgehog tapped his pencil impatiently and stared out the window at the bright daylight outside, an expression of annoyance on his face, as though he had sucked on a particularly sour lemon. At last he cried aloud, "What cruel fate! To be naught but a sock puppet of the gods! Even my rudimentary prose feels divine and inspired to me! Why can't I write fiction of my own?" He retired to the shadows of his room and wept.
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Joined: 3/17/2011
Posts: 6
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She sat and tapped her pencil, watching the shadows creep along the wall. Daylight was fading, as was her last bit of hope. Fate, it would seem, was more powerful than any rudimentary belief in love. She was nothing more than a puppet in his world. This thought always made the light leave her eyes and caused her expression to go flat. Sad truths are bitter and should be taken with a twist of lemon. Out the window, she saw the little hedgehog had returned. He nestled in the old sock she’d dropped earlier by her fuchsia plant. Well, at least someone was happy.
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Joined: 3/15/2011
Posts: 13
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"We're going to put on a puppet show," she said. Daylight was streaming through the dusty window on the far side of the attic, but so little of it managed to crawl through the clutter that her expression was lost to the shadows. She picked up an old sock and handed it to me, slowly and with great care. It slumped in my hands as though resigned to its fate. She handed me a pencil next, and then a small lemon, still cold from the refrigerator. There was such a leaden ponderousness to her movements that it was like she was performing a religious ritual; I didn't dare speak. Neither did she. For a few moments I awkwardly waited for her to continue, until I realized that she meant for me to make the puppet. I fumbled around for two minutes at least - much too long - and ended up with a rudimentary little figure, sort of a cross between a hedgehog and...a lemon-pencil-sock. It was not impressive, even to me. I looked up at her apologetically. She stared at my creation for a moment, then silently took her materials back from my hands, crossed to the ladder, and climbed down out of sight.
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