A Spork in the Road

Cancer swag pays off real-time in the blog! Recently Clarion pal Rick Polney sent me two books (thus tipping the swag balance back in favor of the East Coast, oh-ho!), including Ursula K. LeGuin’s Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew, in which I found the perfect writing exercise.

Simple but difficult: write a descriptive page, 250-300 words, without using any adjectives or adverbs. No dialogue. Try it and link to yours in the comments of this post.

LeGuin calls the exercise “chastity,” for obvious reasons.

Here is mine:

A chair huddled beside a table. Beside it crouched a twin, and so around the perimeter. The chairs formed a quorum and held their council. A runner crawled across the expanse of oak, then draped at the ends. Tassels quivered in the air.

A window yawned from the end of the room, inviting breezes. Muslin billowed, breathing in the summer. Flies drifted into, across, around, out of the room, buzzed their harmonies and escaped. They found neither butter nor sugar nor fly-paper, thus found neither reason to tarry nor reason to flee.

The sideboard bore a teapot whose belly contained air. Vines encircled its handle and lid. It dreamed in silence, conjuring steam and honey, the tang of lemons, leaves that steeped and released notes into the afternoon. Its neighbor languished at the edge: a basket of flowers that aimed for reality and missed by a yard of silk. The blooms collected dust and the corpses of flies that had surrendered to the gloom.

Two sofas squared off. Each claimed the rug, could defend an edge. Each held the loyalty of a brigade of pillows. The war stretched across years. No one in the room imagined its conclusion.

The rug slept. It recalled the history of the room from drywall to redecoration. It hoped for traffic but accepted breezes, dust, accumulation. Accepted the anticipation that permeated the house, awaiting a destiny, awaiting the action that would transform them into an existence they could not imagine but would inhabit with joy and abandon.