Daily 5-Minute Writing Exercise
Here’s a cool link I found:
http://www.cmmayo.com/d5mwe.html
There’s a 5-minute writing exercise for every day of the year. For each day, there’s a little blurb like to start a story. So, you take the blurb and use it to write for 5 minutes straight without stopping. It’s really for writing stories, but I think it would help anyone improve their writing. I found the one for today, and here it is:
October 22 “Falling Mirror”
Today’s exercise is courtesy of Christine Boyka Kluge, a poet and visual artist who lives in North Salem, New York.
Imagine a mirror falling. Into a canyon, into a river, onto a tile floor. Is it an antique hand mirror framed with silver roses, a faceted disco ball, or a fitting room triptych, flapping through space? Was it accidentally thrown? Is the owner of the mirror beautiful and vain, or grotesque and horrified? Perhaps the owner isn’t even human. Is it a flawed angel, an escaped gorilla, a mystified alien? View the world in reflected fragments, be the eye of the mirror as it falls. What scenes are captured as it plummets /drifts / explodes? How do these images impact / “reflect” the mirror’s owner?
Here’s what I wrote:
I am a mirror, falling to the ground. I am falling from a great height, and I turn and turn and turn as I fall. I’m falling from the top of a tree. I can see the sky reflect on my surface as I face upwards, and then the dark ground, getting closer, as I face downward. And then upward, where I came from. In the tree, a person. Now down again, facing the ground, where the dry leaves cover the pine needles and the dirt. Now up again. It’s a skydiver, because I can see the brightly colored parachute tangled in the tree. Now the tree branches crash into me as I fall. I am cracking. Leaves, birds, bark, brush, all is reflected in me. I catch the light. Yes, that’s what I’m for, to catch the light, to signal someone, so that the skydiver can be rescued. I cannot control my fall, I can only hope that I’ll land face-upward, that I’ll reflect the bit of sunlight that will bring help soon enough.
Wow, that was kind of a cool experience. Try it! Let me know what you write… and let me know what you think of my writing, too.
