five nouns
Sometimes, when I’ve been away from my fiction journal for any length of time (and I have been mostly away since … Shanghai), it can be hard to get back into it. I love to do timed exercises to get things going; my favorite by far is to get someone to give me five random nouns which I then write into a scene or sketch. Sometimes what comes out is complete garbage, sometimes it’s better; I don’t edit the exercises, the most I usually get is a nice phrase or two to use elsewhere.
Last week, my nouns were “holiday, organization, president, dancer, Tricia.” Here’s what ten minutes got me:
Jerry met his first girlfriend at Little People’s Preschool; she was four, he was almost five. He tied her shoes and zipped her coat. It never mattered if his own wrists got cold, Jerry always made sure Diane’s mittens went on first, into the sleeves of her coat. Jerry’s one wrist got cold on the playground, but Diane’s were warm all winter. Diane stopped coming to Little People’s when the sunflowers were about to bloom; Jerry’s looked for her every day since then. Sixty years of damp, itchy frustration searching the faces of women for the diaphanous angel he loved as a child.ÂAs a kid Jerry tried football, basketball and track, but pear-shaped Jewish guys tended to ride the pine, so he hung up his cleats and jockstrap in the seventh grade. By high school he was President of the AV club, an organization of tinkerers and misfits. He ran a strict after school meeting, offered maximum support to the curvy librarian, and used the school’s Polaroid camera as his very own.
His first subject was an albino dancer. A tiny little wisp of a thing with the body of a goddess but a vinegar face. Tricia something, names were never Jerry’s forte. Junior year, her father’d passed away and her mother had moved them closer to her people. He saw her when school started in September, watched her move through the halls like a melancholy dream. She never smiled, never looked up. Once the students and teachers grew used to her splotchy face and shaded eyes, Tricia became completely invisible to everyone but Jerry, who knew he absolutely had to have her. He tried the grin-wave that seemed to charm the ladies who shopped with his dad, but Tricia never looked anywhere but at the floor and it wasn’t until right before Thanksgiving that he managed to get her attention. Jerry worked it until Christmas break, chatting her up in the lunch line and outside the science room, he spent $21.95 and bought her the keychain full of charms his dad kept in the glass box at the cash/wrap.
He’d fallen in love with the broad landscape of her flat face, the Florida-shaped colorless patch on her right cheek, the fiery indignation in her eyes when he stripped her naked in his bedroom and stood with his back pressed against the door as he snapped Polaroid after Polaroid of her looking straight at him.
If you feel like it, leave a noun in the comments and I’ll use it the next time I post an exercise from the journal.
December 21st, 2007 at 1:40 pm
shampoo