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Part 2 — What We Talk About When We Talk About Children

Cut & Paste Exercise “I haven’t given up on children,” Tonya said. She was so sweet, even now with her delicate shoulders hunched into sharp arches and her forehead in commune with the table. “We can go to the a…
Part 1 — What We Talk About When We Talk About Bamboo

Cut & Paste Exercise. “It was just bamboo,” Merril said, “I could remake it.” He reached to a hand to knot one of Tonya’s dark curls around his index finger but thought better of it and retreated. She was so swee…
Flash Fiction: Under 136 characters.

For the Times Cheltenham Twitter Competition. Some are better than others. [Warning for those sensitive to sexually explicit terms: avoid numbers three and nine.] Dog days of summer & Sally was dying to do…
Points if you actually read this entirely. Hell, I didn't.

This exercise is called The Elastic Sentence. You begin with a two-word sentence and keep adding words, then short phrases, until you have an approx. 40-word sentence; then you pare back down to create a brand-new two-wo…
The Mystery of Other People Exercise

(Prompt is in italics) It’s eight a.m. The woman feeding the pigeons is silently crying. Though it’s 80 degrees outside, and sunny, she’s wearing rain boots and a heavy winter hat. She’s all alone. For some reason, …
Residue of Life exercise.

The building is stark white, so gleaming in the direct sunlight that the shadows in the nooks of its white-stone walls are barely perceptible. Above the door, the words “Fairmont Community Church” are shaded in th…
First-sentence stories.

This was an assignment for class, in which I was given the first sentence (all of which are from an actual novel/story, though I had never read them before). I was instructed to write approx. 5 sentences after each of th…
I love you, but I hate Biology.

Are we no more than chemicals, or are chemicals no more than us?
Also, Ah-Ha's "Take Me On" is stuck in my head.

I keep beginning stories in my mind, taking them interesting places, and stopping them before I think them all the way through and losing them. That's the way my mind works. I have a thought and as soon as it reaches res…
The rain that seeps down a narrow pane.

I'll admit I don't remember much. Honestly, I felt the most terror of all this morning, when I rolled over from what felt like an especially hard lump in my pillow and wiped the sleep from the corners of my mouth and saw…