Writing Exercise: One Minute, One Sentence

My writing group had an exercise from The Five Minute Writer by Margret Geraghty. The exercise says, ""Take one minute to write a single sentence. Don't think too hard and don't worry if it doesn't make sense." Some ideas are provided in the book:

• "Write a sentence about an animal.
• Write a sentence about an inanimate object.
• Write a sentence beginning with a name.
• Write a sentence about the weather."
• etc.

We took ten minutes to write a few sentences based on the ideas in the list that inspired us. I came up with a few odd balls.

• Walter was worried about the weather for it had changed too many times in the space of a minute.
• The table was waiting patiently for the meal to come to it.
• I embrace death as a solution to my problems; not my death, of course.
• Water moves with a grace unfathomable to the casual observer.
• She left on a six-foot journey...six feet down.
• The summer never really comes to Yorkshire.
• The chicken didn't cross the road since it couldn't think of a punch line.

Our next step (which is something beyond the book exercise) was to expand a sentence into a couple of paragraphs. Naturally, I chose the chicken sentence.

The chicken didn't cross the road since it couldn't think of a punch line. "How am I going to get across this road?" he thought angrily to himself. The world is so unfair. He had been happy in his old world, where he couldn't think, he was just a normal chicken living a hum-drum barn life. Sure, he'd eventually get served as a Sunday dinner but he wouldn't ever have known so it wouldn't bother him. Being able to reason isn't all it's cracked up to be.

The other problem was the existence of all these strange, unpredictable, and unfathomable rules in this world. Where's the benefit of having brains when everything is chaotic? Take this road for example. It's a toll road but the toll is to tell a joke. Who made up that rule? There might be plenty of stories about chickens but when has a chicken ever told one? Let alone a funny one.

He could just turn back, but that would mean going back to the barn and today was Saturday. Not a good prospect with the farmer's wife having that sparkle in her eye every time she saw him. That would not be a funny story.

We ran out of time and I ran out of inspiration simultaneously, so that's the end of the story. For now...