Johnathan Colourfield's Writing Exercises - 6. Session Six: 18th July 2011

Exercise One: Imagine it’s Christmas time and you still have a lot of your shopping to do, so you’re skipping work. Your boss won’t accept “I’m not feeling well” as an excuse. He requires a more outlandish reason. Write an excuse that starts with “You’re not going to believe this, but…” and ends with the phrase, “… and that’s why I can’t come to work today.”

“You’re not going to believe this but I’m afraid.”

I could feel my boss sneering at me from across the phone line. “What are you afraid of?”

“I’m afraid of the cat that lives with the old lady next door.”

“That’s really not an excuse. Either come in or you’re fired.”

“Sir. I really cannot come in. It just sits there and last time I left my room it launched itself onto me and scratched half my face off. It happened last night and I’ve been in the bathroom overnight trying to cover up the scars it gave me but I can’t do it.”

“Goodness. How bad are they?”

“At least an inch deep. I tried to get out to go to the emergency room but it still was sat there. I even collapsed late night. I thought I had died.”

“Can’t you just kick it out of the way?” He started to get irritated. I sighed and continued my terrible excuse.

“That would be inhumane. The old lady refuses to take it in and that is why I can’t come into work today.”

Exercise Two: Write a short story containing these five words: Shirt, box, sky, green, earth. Not necessarily in this order. (This poor guy really didn’t deserve how I treated him but it was good to find out what would happen when I wrote about these five words :P)

The morning was never my favourite point in time. Especially when you live in a rainy city such as London. As I look up to the sky as I leaved my boxed up apartment (its full of different boxes because I just moved across the earth from Australia), it opens the heavens and I sigh.

I walk to work and I look across to the Cricket Green and I see my brother playing. He was always very good at sports.

I was walking staring at his work mate when a cricket ball came plummeting through the sky and it landed next to me, within an inch of my shirt and a centimetre from my head.

That was a close one. I really was not having a good day. Hopefully the rest of the day goes better.

Fingers crossed please.

Exercise Three: Write a scene where it is not possible to see anything. This could be because its pitch-black, or because the narrator is blind. (Quite a funny little one here. I enjoyed it J)

“Come on boys you can do better than that. Get your bloody arses into gear. You lazy bunch of…”

The Group Leader shouted at us. We had started a game which had the lights switched out on us and the Scout leaders shouting insults at us to make us angry to make us make mistakes in one of my favourite games that we played in the dark, Sneakers.

The aim of the game was to catch as many flags as you can from the trouser pockets of the other people. Five points for a yellow flag, One point for a blue flag and you lose five points if you picked out a red flag. But we couldn’t see anything so we didn’t know what they had reached until after the lights were turned.

I was sneaking and I grabbed ahold of a person I felt brush past me and snatched one of their flags. From what I could feel they didn’t have any left after I had my shot.

The game continued and several grabbing motions were made until I reached the weirdest boy. I reached towards him but I accidentally grabbed his crotch. I felt something grow in my hand and I freaked out grabbing my flag. I turned away and all I could feel was a hand going across the back of my rear.

And the weird thing was, it felt quite good…

The lights came on at that point. I had five flags. All of them red.

I was so annoyed. I looked round the room trying to find the person who smacked me and got a hard on.

I looked over to Mark, the butchest member of the team and he winked at me.

Jesus, he was gay?