I have my students work on longer pieces that they continue to revisit and revise throughout the year. While shorter, daily prompts provide novelty and can hone target skills, nothing is better preparation for the life of a writer than sticking with something for an extended time. I am working on a longer piece of my own, coming back to an old idea I first started when I was a creative writing student in high school myself. I, of course, have changed my views on the characters, theme, and purpose of the whole thing, but I'm excited to reflect on those changes.
Here's the beginning, or, at least, what I wrote first: Carson stumbled out of the club, spat out from the too-small doors along with dozens of other leather-clad, spiked, and studded show-goers. She stomped on thighs and calves devoid of bone, only her absolute faith in the steel-toed Doc Martins punctuating her legs kept her upright and moving. The exertion of the show, between the kicking, slam dancing, skanking, fist pumping, and all around crowd-sanctioned brawling, left her buzzing with adrenalin but with zero muscle endurance to do anything about it. Her breath, still labored and ragged, burst from her busted lip into an opaque cloud in the D.C. winter night. Steam rose in plumes from the bodies of the sweaty, panting youth. Scanning through the mass of teens and twenty-somethings yelling at friends to be heard over the damage done to their ears, Carson sought out any sign of her own group. She jostled to the curb, unconcerned with the bodies she hip-checked out of her way. She’d be lost in another layer of people before they’d look to see who shoved them, if they even looked at all. But with everyone redefining natural expectations of personal space after the sardine can experience of the past two hours, her bee-line path would likely go unnoticed. When she reached the curb and found the broken newspaper kiosk, she threw open the busted door, wedged a boot into the hinged opening, and hoisted her petite frame above the mohawks and liberty spikes topping the crowd around her.
2 Comments
Ashton Cox
11/30/2016 10:49:24 am
You read this in class for our sharing circle, and I have to say; this is an amazing piece, it's rather well written and it goes into in-depth detail. :)
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Mikayla Smith
11/30/2016 11:56:33 am
I can't get over how much I love this. I also like the fact that you wrote this in high school and are coming back to it; that's real dedication. Carson intrigues me; I can't help but wonder what's going on through her mind when she decides to use a kiosk to search through the endless sea of edgy teens and twenty year olds who think it's cool to sell pieces of paper with stickers on them to minors and tell them it's MDMA. I await more from this, and I'm overall excited to read more.
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AuthorMs. Jopling teaches English at Broadway High School, eats an unseemly amount of cheese, and laughs as often as possible. Archives
November 2017
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