Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Creative Writing Club: Clock Taboo

Yesterday, I introduced to you a new series: Creative Writing Club! This series outlines the activities that my high school Creative Writing Club does in order to get inspired.

Yesterday, I shared the first activity that we did in this week's meeting. Today, I will share the second (and final) activity that we did in our meeting for this week.

To start, our club listed several specific topics we could hypothetically write about. These topics included clocks, Stonehenge, Jerry Seinfeld, etc. We chose one topic as a group and then brainstormed a series of words commonly associated with the first word. Our teacher challenged us to write about the first topic without using any of the words we listed.

So we had to write about a clock without using any of the following words: clock, tick-tock, hand, minute, hour, time, second, face, number, pendulum, antique. Basically, this was like the game taboo.

I wrote this:

Running around, stuck in the eternity that ends only when midnight is struck. There's no need for me to carve hash marks into the walls of my prison, as this round cage already contains them. These hash marks dictate my life. Each hash mark passed is life lost, and every 360 marks, an infernal dinging rings inside my head. Those outside this dome jump with fright at every ding, but I envy them: they are free.

Now, I'm challenging you to write anything about a clock without mentioning the taboo words (clock, tick-tock, hand, etc. as listed above).

If you participate, feel free to post below!

2 comments:

  1. Wow, that's a pretty cool exercise! I've never done anything like that before...gosh, it must be hard! "These hash marks dictate my life." <--- I really like that sentence!!

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    1. Thank you! I thought the exercise was hard when I first started, but got easier as I wrote and realized which words I couldn't use. You should try! :)

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