Creative Writing Exercise

1. Save your most recent grocery list. It must be yours sand contain several items.
2. Write about your list, item by item. What does each item mean to you.
3. Write about what each item says about the world.
4. Close with three questions for reflection.
5. Reflect.

  -- doug smith

Five Minutes: Just So That You Know

She wrapped the bandage, even though the cut was still bleeding.

"Hold that over your head," she said. "Do it now."
"For how long?"
"Until I tell you to stop. Unless I forget, then maybe ten minutes."
"That seems like a long time."
"Just hold it over your head. Have I ever been wrong?"
"..."
"I head that."
"What?"
"That silence. You know I'm right so just keep holding it up."

It felt like the bleeding had stopped but his heart was still pumping rapidly. His pulse was a cadence even a marching band could hear.

She opened the window. A quick breeze blew a paper off of the table. It floated a moment and before it drifted to the floor the cat batted it around, keeping it aloft like a balloon.

"Can I put it down yet?"
"No. Did I tell you to yet?"
"..."
"I hear that..."

The cat pounced on the paper, smashing it to the floor. The cat resumed washing some essential piece of fur, over and over, over and over.

"You can put it down now."
"Thank you. I was just about to ask."
"You're not bleeding out. It was barely more than a paper cut."
"It hurt."
"You're a woosh."
"..."
"...!"

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FIVE MINUTES
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1. Write for exactly five minutes, then stop.
2. Find a random image to add

Improv Prompt

Improv Scene Prompt:

1. Read the quote
2. Reflect for one-minute
3. Start your scene

Here's the quote (but you can use the same prompt with other quotes, too):

Do not admire famous people too much -- they could carry a sadness that would crush you.

-- doug smith

Living Creatively

One of the best things about improv is that it stimulates your creativity. The subtle feeling of not knowing what you will do or what will happen next seems to open a door to the muse and allow technicolor waves of insights to leak thru. Those insights aren't always funny. They are not meant to be. Those insights are not always brilliant. Those are the odds. The insights ARE meant to generate more insights and more fumbles, practices, missteps, dreams, and drops.

Drops and dreams. Dreams and drops. The creative process is messy.

Living creatively is your specialty. Go for it.

-- doug smith

Picture This: Clown Mirage

The clown convention disbanded without a sound.

Rows and rows of too big shoes sat in the street, surrounding the mailbox as if they'd tried half-heartedly to send themselves home. The clowns were nowhere to be found.

After a few minutes the whole thing felt like a mirage. Were there ever any clowns at all? Who had the power to clear the town out so quickly? Consider this: clowns, maligned as they are and misunderstood in part by their own design and in part because, well, who really understands the impulse to paint your face white and make your features look distorted? All to juggle? All to ride a tiny bike?

They were going to visit, surround, transform, redefine the Corn Palace. Corny at last. But the ayes didn't have it and neither did the clowns, so there's no reason for you to take it, either. Instead, let's just ride away.

-- doug smith

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Picture This:
1. Find a random image (truly, close your eyes!)
2. Write for two minutes, inspired by that image.
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Five Minutes: The Parade at the Hub

She spilled her hot coffee right in my lap. I didn't know if I was more angry or more in pain. She'd been balancing a full arm load of books, her phone, and her hot coffee. Oh, if only the phone had landed in my lap.

"Oops, sorry..." she said, as if she'd tapped my shoe with her toe.
"What the heck! Are you kidding me?" I think I said, although it might well have been peppered with some saucy language often heard in a commercial kitchen or volunteer fire house. I was not please. She kept on walking.

The coffee, about half escaped and half still in her cup, caused me to jump up and though I had nothing to spill, my journal did hit the floor and tear the page I was writing on. Stream of consciousness meet scream of coffee.

She kept on walking, still holding half a cup of coffee and whatever important information was displaying on her phone.

Be calm, I told myself. Maybe I shouldn't have been sitting on the floor. Maybe I should be glad the whole cup didn't hit me. Maybe I should change my pants.

Coffee. It's so much better to drink it than to spill it.

-- doug smith

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Five Minutes:
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1. Write without stopping for five minutes.
2. Add a random (if possibly related) image.

Picture This: Say Yes to Mr. Tubs

Can anyone really say yes better than a dog? Hardly.

My dog friend (one of a few) Mr. Tubs is a champion say yes kind of guy, and he insists that I play just as unconditionally. When I enter my friend Judi's house, Tubs comes running to see who it is. When he sees who it is (me!) he retreats to find his favorite toy of the moment and trots to me with the offer to play.

Say yes, human. Just say yes.

If I'm preoccupied, his eyes say "say yes."

If I say "not now, Tubbers..." he remains on point, ready to go, slobbering with anticipation, unable to conceive of a negative thought between me and yes. Say yes.

Improv actors say yes. If you forget how, please...play with a dog.

Just look at that face. There's no "no" in that face. There's no room for killing the scene. There is only keeping the playing alive.

Say Yes to Mr. Tubs.

Say yes to your improv partners.

Say yes to life.

-- doug smith

Creativity Generator: Picture This

1. Find a random picture (seriously, keep your eyes closed and make it random)
2. Write for 2 minutes, guided by the picture

Five Minutes: Find Your Voice

I sat in the back of the church, in what was now her office but was once the crying room, the place where people could be in church with their crying babies but be behind a glass wall. It was her office now. Not much need for a crying room. The church didn't see many babies these days. Mostly the few people who attended had gray hair. Or no hair. They walked slowly. And if they cried, it was oh so quietly.

They did cry. Quietly.

The minister was soft spoken. A kind man. A decent enough speaker but the rare paster who was truly a minister to the people and not an ego driven speaker. But he wasn't here. It's Tuesday. A parade of hopeful teens were getting their voice lessons, hoping to be on American Idol or some other talent show. Hoping to get into the high school musical. Hoping to set the world on fire and be famous.

They didn't know the odds were slim and...to their parent's delight the voice teacher had a rep. She had a track record. She was more than a miracle worker, she was a winner's coach. Some of her students really did go on to stardom. Beauty pageant winner. Broadway star. TV personality. Her patience, her persistence, her insistence drove these young people to ride their own enthusiasm ever upward. There was just one thing everyone needed to do more of. Much more. Much, much more:  practice.

"I know you didn't come here to pay me to watch you practice," she said, cheerful and resolved and not at all angry. Her patience was unending. "So maybe you'd like to practice more this week between lessons, sweetie..."

She called everyone sweetie. Or dear. I asked her to call me something else, something she didn't call anyone else, so she called me Honey. And then, soon enough, she started calling everyone Honey.

But that was when I really was her Honey. And that was when she did still help create stars.

-- doug smith

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FIVE MINUTES
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1. Write for exactly five minutes, then stop.
2. Find a random image to add

Five Minutes: There Is No Monologue

She got up to the front of the stage, ready to start her monologue. The lights were brighter than usual with a random slide show slightly illuminating the audience. It was a small crowd, probably no more than fifteen people. They seemed attentive and not yet drunk enough to get loud. Maybe she could pull this off.

What's up with the slides, though? She did not expect this. Maybe she should extemporaneously comment about the slides. What were they about. But no, it was time to start her monologue.

She faced the audience, at least half of which was more focused on other things. She'd better take focus NOW.

I will need two random words from the audience to begin.

"Random words"
"Dinosaur"
"Elevator"
"Global warming"
"Picture window"
"Dinosaur"
"Sex"
"Relationships"
"Shopping"
"Zero"

She boldly selected: "Dinosaur Sex" she said. That will be the topic of my monologue.

"Sounds like a winner," said an audience member, a man about 25 who was just getting his buzz on.

"So ends the audience participation portion of this monologue," she said, not at all nervous but not at all focused. What were the two words?

"There is no monologue," said the buzzing guy's date. She seemed more buzzed than him. "And you forgot your two words, didn't you?"

How could she admit it?  She did.

-- doug smith

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FIVE MINUTES
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1. Write for exactly five minutes, then stop.
2. Find a random image to add

Five Minutes: Train vs. Bicycle

You could hear the train for a full thirty seconds before it got within range. Anyone interested in their own safety would give it room.

We waited with our musical equipment to watch the train pass. No need to turn your back on a train. It's like turning your back on the ocean - you just don't do it. Not if you want to be safe. Not if you don't want to be bad news.

Or, maybe I was overly cautious. My mom filled me with fear saying that a train would suck me right under it and cut off my legs and arms if I got too close. How close is too close? We were nearly too close.

I hear laughter from the band. It was a good night of music and the tips were decent. Plus, the beer was free and flowed plentifully. William even enjoyed a giant marguerita. It took three hours to drink, but there was beer in between. And oh, the sizzling fajitas (which we did pay for) hit the spot.

We played every song we'd rehearsed, and then because they wanted more, we played them all again. We could have gone all Grateful Dead and jammed twenty minutes on two songs, but instead repeated the set. I was ready to improvise new tunes, and we even tried that.

Now the load out and the train. So loud we couldn't even hear Dee's voice (normally audible even in a stadium filled with people) and then it happened. With the train just a few feet away and not slowing for a moment, a bicycle sped across the tracks.

For a moment I saw the rider sucked under the massive train, severed limbs flying in every direction.

But the train missed the rider, the rider missed the train, and life for now went on.

"What the hell! Is he crazy?" she said, now perfectly audible for about a mile.

Trains. Bicycles. And we weren't even in Boulder.

-- doug smith


Five Minutes: Writing improvisationally without filters for five minutes and then stopping. Then, perhaps, finding a random image to go with it.

Five Minutes: Her Plan

That wasn't what she said. He thought it was, but it was trickier than that. It was something so subtle she couldn't even tell that her plan to outsmart him was working.

It was so easy.

He was never smart when it came to her.

Birds flew in his brain erratically ringing bells and rattling shutters as if a hurricane was headed his way. It was. Her hurricane. Her plan of raging menacing love, focused on getting everything in place.

Honestly, he saw her as the most honest person he knew.

Honestly, she mean to be completely honest. At all times. Even (especially) with him. But she lied.

She lied about eternity. She lied about love. And she lied about the body buried in the basement.

Who was that? How did he get there? What did she have to do with it?

He'll never know. He had nothing to do with her for ten years or more and now, back in her life, he has nothing to say about what she did during that time. No reason to get upset about any of it. It was (as Adele sang in the background), water under the bridge.

He preferred Patty Griffin. The bare, essential, raw Patty Griffin that she played the first time they slept together (again). It felt oddly unrelated and yet completely related. What did Moses have to do with this? Who was Lorraine?

It didn't end the way he'd planned. Was it nerves? Was it trouble? Was it all in her plan?

No, nothing was in her plan. She'd planned it that way.



-- Doug Smith

Five Minutes: Writing improvisationally without filters for five minutes and then stopping. Then, perhaps, finding a random image to go with it.