Creative Writing Exercises - Setting

February 22nd

Write about 2 situations that deal with the following objects

a metal framed bed
a box of kleenex
a thin trashcan
a nightstand with a glass of water, a pitcher, and a bowl of fruit
a pastel with cows grazing in the fields and mountains and the sun in the background

1) you are in the hospital with your loved one. Your loved wife has given birth to a son/daughter. the characters are happy, but also afraid like any new parents

2) Write about a loved one and their offspring visiting them in the hospital. It is a sad moment as the older is dying, but he/she is loved by all, especially the one visiting.

I had fifteen minutes

1) When you have a baby in your hands, everything feels dangerous. I tried to make my way around those hard edges of the bed. And slowly, almost in slow motion, I rested myself, one arm supporting our weight, the other holding the newborn. I had no idea that the chair had a sickly green tone. I had no idea Oprah was on. My wife smiled to reassure me that I was doing fine on my own. I looked down at her. She was weightless in my excitement. The fact that all I was at one moment was some little bunch made me almost nauseous. The pastel to the left showed cows: in a pasture before a great mountainside. Doesn't matter the setting, I thought, we are still just cows. I looked again at my wife, and in our gaze was the same thought. We had never raised a cow before.

2) I couldn't help but notice those damn cows. In all those generic hospital rooms, no one pays attention to the paintings until extreme conditions give it a worthy look. Cows. Cattle. Bovine of the beyond it seemed with the setting sun in between mountains. And there was my mother to the right.
"Hello Mother", and I tried to smile.
"Hello son", and she tried not to cry.
I reached over and grabbed a kleenex box as I made my way to the table.
"Men are like kleenex: soft strong and disposable." I recited as I stole one out to hand it to her. She laughed as her frail arms took it.
"From a movie", she said off-hand, "as always".
"Still works here", I said. She knew what came next and I waited for silence before I said, "has he come yet?" She looked away, before firing her nose into the kleenex followed by a well thrown shot into the small trash can. It made no noise but it must've been a bowling ball going in the way I saw it. She had not even eaten her fruit on the nightstand.

What I wrote in duress: Creative Writing Exercises

January 18th
The restrictions were I must write anything but it must begin with, “I was pummeled as a teenager.”

In ten minutes

    I was pummeled as a teenager, and now I wanted to return the favor. By the time I had my third drink that was all I could imagine. Bryant was standing twenty feet away with his idiotic looking red mustache. No one ever moves around here. Cheryll was talking to me non-stop and all I could think about was making Bryant’s face redder with the back end of a ketchup bottle.
    Maybe I could taunt him until he swung his fat fists. I hadn’t considered those fists. Construction work really does broaden those physical horizons.
    “What’s wrong?” Cheryll whispered as she knocked my anger spiel with a grip to the shoulder.
    “Nothing, keep going. The kids, were they reasonable today?” She mumbled about how her students don’t understand responsibility. I guess things don’t change, considering Bryant is laughing twenty feet away without any knowledge of my existence. I’m gonna walk over there.
    But I didn’t do it. I got up, grabbed my coat and just said, “let’s find somewhere else” and left. Pathetic. It was that mustache. I’ll never return the favor.

January 25th
The restrictions were I must write about a character that is capable of change and changes from:
Angry to Ashamed
Attracted to Disgusted
Exhausted to Enthusiastic
Determined to Uncertain

In ten minutes

    I am a man. I am a man with a helping hand. But now my hand was swatted away. I was always there when I was needed. She would look at me in the kitchen, silent, and I would plead with her. I would provide her shoe shopping. I took the kids to practice. I washed the damn dog. These things were an outward expression that I assume she never noticed. Because then I saw her. I saw her that night get out of our van and scurry to that other man’s house. I watched her throw herself at him at the doorway. I observed their uncaring aggression throughout the house. I knew somewhere that she didn’t appreciate me. She hated that dog. She detested football practice. She loathed me, and my job.  
    I am a man. I know that now. I’m going to fix this. Real men, real humans solve problems. I’ll solve this one. My office is very high: 13th floor in fact. I’ll get to wave goodbye as I fall. I approached the window. Slowly, cautiously, quietly, I opened the window. Traffic whispers clung below. I exited to the ledge and looked down.
    My office is very high. I can jump. I can fix this. I will fix this. The cars below leaped in and out of focus. I turned and vomited on my office floor. I am a man, and I’ll never fix this problem.

Mediocrity

Bullets are flying, and I need air support. Venezualen radicals fighting in a revolution and I’m in their way. The sun is setting as huge billowing clouds of smoke arise from destroyed jeeps and Armored Personnel Carriers. I can barely see a light tank on an opposite hill firing shells in my face. I am inevitably doomed. If only I had the air support to provide cover as I’m running through the smoke and through the sun. Suddenly, rocket propelled grenades are shot from all sides, and I’m dead. I’m nothing more than a withering hulk thrown against the side of a ship of chaos.

But suddenly I’m back, ready to die again. My wounds are healed, and there is a pistol in my hand. There is a jeep outside and another mission waiting for me. This is not real life. This is me playing the thoroughly mediocre video game Mercenaries 2: World in Flames and even though there is nothing in this game I haven’t seen elsewhere, it speaks to me as I live through one of the terrible moments in my life.

Sequel to Pandemic’s hit game Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction it becomes quite clear what the underlying theme of their games are: “blow shit up.” Pandemic also brought games like Star Wars Battlefront , a game where you blew shit up in Star Wars. And like some, well maybe most games out there, it attempts to be an escape rather than a piece of art. So the Mercenaries franchise simply places a plot like, “someone is taking over a government” so you can have multiple factions competing for power, and then have someone like you, a mercenary to take missions from all sides. Because you don’t care about the conflict, you care about the money. To the player however, all you care about is the destruction.

And while the first game was received rather well, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames was almost an unmitigated disaster. “That Mercenaries 2: World in Flames isn't better seriously bums me out. Even in its current state you can see so much potential for breakneck, anarchic fun, which makes its laundry list of problems that much more frustrating.” said GiantBomb.com’s own Ryan Davis. It seems like a lot of potential was possible on the Xbox 360 rather than the original, but it just did not get used. However, the game was not a complete failure. Ryan Davis also states: “The thing is, for all its problems, the basic act of blowing shit up in Mercenaries 2 is incontrovertibly awesome. The way a jeep will flip up into the air in a fiery ball; the wince-inducing white flash of an exploding oil container; the belching dust and debris of a crumbling building; these things are all immensely satisfying, and they make up for a lot of the shortcomings in Mercenaries 2.”

This is to me, a pure classification of something that is mediocre. When you’re the best of the worst and the worst of the best, you are Mercenaries.

So here I am, playing this so-so game and shooting rockets at tanks, and dodging gunfire, wondering if I will ever escape my own prevailing feeling of self destruction.

Mediocrity feels everywhere. Not just in Garth Brooks’s Friends in Low Places but everywhere. Tyler Durden in Fight Club knows exactly what I’m talking about. And while I cannot stand the thought of being mundane, I unknowingly embrace it. Pall Malls are $4.50 a pack and Big K at Kroger is $2.19 for a 12 pack. You can’t beat that, but it’s almost like I am now embracing the low class things in life as a sort of rebellion. And even that attempt is mundane and has been done before. What do you think Garth Brooks is talking about in that song? It’s a pride thing. It’s saying, “Yea those are my friends, but they’re more than you’ll ever have.”

Stop trying to be perfect. The whole philosophy behind Fight Club doesn’t quite revolve around this, but it is tangentially affected by a rebound from consumerism. I cannot help but be whoever anyone wants me to be. We are who people want us to be. I think people say, “it’s rude to talk about yourself” because people mostly don’t care. And people want me to be mediocre.

C’s are the worst grades in college to get on essays. In one way, you peaked the teacher’s interest enough to keep you from failing. On the other, you still failed to grasp some underlying approach that was key. It’s the kiss of death for your moral.

So when I go into Naval History and come out with a 75 on my ten page essay, I’m angry. I’m really angry. Not only is it a terrible grade, but it is a shot at something I feel I work at a lot and that is my writing. And when something shoots directly at your strengths and cuts them down you wonder if there was a strength there at all. Once again, I could not escape mediocrity. It was there in my very face, on a piece of paper marked 75: pure objective proof that I was a failure. That’s why I hate essays sometimes. You pour all this work into it, when you could just bullshit it and still get a 75, but you don’t even know if that is true.

What is my worth anymore? Betty Draper in Mad Men wonders that after her divorce. How do you define yourself in a world of so many when you are so few. And while Betty is able to woo mechanics into fixing her broken down car late at night by selling something she’ll never give away, I feel a little short. What would Rachel Menken be without that Jewish department store around the corner? It’s hard to find an objective display of your own personal worth. That’s probably why I prefer writing and singing to complete strangers. Because friends always have a preconceived notion to be your friend. They’ll never tell you, “you are quite magnificently mediocre.” What does that even mean? Strangers however, will easily ignore you if you present a mediocre work. Ever been at a high school concert where everyone knew that they were bad, but no one will out right say it?

I’ve always had a problem with mediocrity. As much as I try to avoid its glaring and all encompassing stare, it always seems to come back to me. At one point I thought I was a good football player. That was before I met people like Shane Lockridge in junior high that could grow facial hair before I could grow hair…anywhere. I thought I was a good baseball player. That was before I collapsed under my own insecurity that I was not destined to be great. I thought I was a good singer. That was before I went to UNT, and while I love this college from the bottom of my heart, there was a realization that I was in the ocean, and the ocean was too cold and bottomless for me. So what does someone like Colton Royle do when they get a 75 on a paper? I don’t get drunk. I go to the mall and buy ten dollar Mercenaries, because that is how I want to vent. I want to escape reality and blow up some buildings. And inadvertently I threw myself back into mediocrity without even thinking it.

Do you know why tragedies exist? People hate the idea of someone being that great, so we have to destroy our ideal persona and we are still laughing and cackling in the background. Most of us in our lives will be mediocre, and it pains us to see someone better than us in every way. It hurts me so bad that I cannot breathe. I literally could not think straight on the bus ride to the mall to buy the stupid game that violently reflected this conflict in my mind. And I paid them to do it.