I discovered The Write Practice the other day while quietly hounding clues on how to write more effectively. The first thing I discovered is that I shouldn’t be as embarrassed as I was to be searching for writing tips in the first place, the second that this blog has some great exercises to partake in that are really helpful.
The first exercise I tried involved writing the last sentence of a story first. Contributors were asked to comment with four sentences that could be used to complete a current or future story they were working on. I chose these four endings for a sci-fi short I am currently working on:
1. The irony of my wishes, that the burnt ash of our bodies would safely float down in the direction they were intended.
2. I hope they can enjoy the lights.
3. I’ve grown to accept my fall, comforted in knowing that for now I’m no longer watching.
4. It grows smaller still, I feel I was only a visitor anyway.
The second (so far) was to write either a fiction or non-fiction part on a hard aspect of your own childhood, depending on which style you are least comfortable in. Having only worked on fiction, I chose to retell exactly what happened to me in hospital:
I imagine one of the hardest things to ever be told is an estimation on your life. I know, for me, I had the most difficulty hearing the recovery rates of the immune mediated Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM).
ADEM, a Multiple Sclerosis borderline, has an incidence rate of about eight per million people per year. I was unlucky enough to fit into that eight when I was fifteen years old. For those that don’t know, and I hadn’t until I was already over a week into my hospital stay, the mortality rate can be as high as five percent.
I’d been bed-ridden with the mysterious ailment, for which there is no real forewarning or concrete explanation, for the better part of a month already. Come to think, it could’ve been longer than that. After a while I stopped counting how many Home Improvement reruns I’d watched and significantly lost
track of time. During this period, I was under the false diagnosis of a particularly bad case of Tonsillitis .
While I did, in fact, have Tonsillitis at the time, my GP was ill-equipped to tell that it would lead to a much more severe condition. He sent me home with a box of antibiotics and told me that the light-headedness and incredible sense of nausea were uncommon but expected side effects of the viral infection. I was told I should rest, and I would be better in a week or two.
Come my second week in hospital (in my second month of being ill) unable to speak, move, or do anything other than moan and turn to the overwhelming pain in my head and wheeze of my upset stomach, a new(er) doctor had come to warn my parents – who, bless them, took shifts in sleeping beside my bed each night – just how devastating ADEM could be.
I’m not sure if he thought I was asleep, if my near vegetative state had fooled him into thinking I could not hear, or if he considered it important I knew, but I
remember him standing at the foot of my bed, telling:
The mortality rate can be as high as five percent. While somewhere between fifty and seventy percent of cases can see a full recovery, at times a further sixty to ninety percent will recover with residual disability.
There was a high chance of brain damage causing mental disability.
This came to worry me more than my expanding headaches, and much more than my upset stomach.
Already, I feel as though I’m learning and becoming more comfortable with my writing, and all I’ve written is a few sentences I pulled out of my arse and an incredibly stilted recap of something horrible.
I implore every aspiring writer to sign up and do some of these. They’re a great deal of fun.
Head on over to The Write Practice and start writing, and post your own examples from these two activities in the comments here as well. I’d love to read them.
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Pulled Molars 