A Writing Excercise: Dreamtable

You should write everyday. I do, but it isn't always easy. Sometimes you can feel uninspired or just don't feel what you are writing. This is something that has occasionally troubled me, and I love to write.

When I realized this I started making up little ways of exciting myself about writing on days where the best words to describe me were "ehh" and "blehh" and the dreaded "mehh".

These are in reality just writing exercises/activities but I created my own name for them. Called them MWE's (Making Writing Exciting). The MWE that I'm featuring today, I call Dreamtable.DreamTableDreamtable is all about learning how to look at something as other than it literally is. That's what we do as writers we describe things in new ways, we tell the world what it could be. What I find most useful about the Dreamtable MWE is that it helps me get my mind in unusual and interesting places to write from.

Choose Five (5) inanimate objects surrounding you. Take a good look at them, now close your eyes. What do you see, what do you imagine. Write it, write your little dreams. Five sentences per item, five different descriptions. It doesn't matter their format really. Just use the words that come.Example of DreamTable Exercise

I am writing this while sitting in a Starbucks, so my items are limited. I choose a Chair, a hanging lamp above the bar, my black Deerstag shoes, a tall cup of Starbucks coffee (Half-Full) and a small round table.

Chair

1. Ocean water trapped in wood erupts from the ground, wave on wave piled up to form a seat.
2. A place of giants, where ants would build cities and be crushed in the most asinine of ways.
3. If it was less comfortable the thing would kill, it would be called a chair...but chairs are meant to sit in not to die in and it was only fit for that.
4. Such a tiny thing that weighs so little holds such larger things that weigh so much, I weep then for the sufferings of the chair.
5. A tree that dared to tower high now brought low by whims of man, their dreaded foe.

Round Table

1. A plateau rising up above the flat and arid desert that was the floor.

2. Arthurian, enduring and small a table from which equality did call.
3. A hole raised up, inverted and placed upon a column of metal.
4. The table was round as the full moon and looked to be the same size as that heavenly body we see in the sky.
5. As it could be a moon, it could be a planet or a star the table was a sphere shoved into the heavenly map that was the Starbucks flattened as if from a bird's eye view.

Black Deerstag Shoes

1. They made my feet into mummies both, wrapping them in white cloth and encasing them in darkness.
2. Like two dark monsters they crashed down upon the floor, each one chasing the other step by step.
3. Called by the insects the Life Enders, the two shoes rejoiced in their killing ways.
4. No two shoes were ever better suited for killing than these black, leather and quiet as a grave.
5. Noble as a stag, fleet as a deer, too bad the name so ill befits the shoes.

Hanging Lamps

1. Acorns made of my light hanging from the ceiling, bait in the trap for any cosmic squirrels passing by.
2. Shapely as nuts and glowing brightly, like to give gutter-minds more than ample provocation.
3. Two cords as black as night to trap the suns that filled the lamps with light.
4. The lights provided a way for Starbucks to extend it's client base, they are marketing tactics to attract rodents, little did Starbucks know that they have enough of the human variety in spades.
5. They came from another place and felt out of tune with all around, the ends of lightning bugs from some other realm.
Half-Full Cup of Coffee

1. Raising from the table like a rocket upturned, the coffee sloshed here and there like fuel in a tank.
2. A volcano of some kind, a pit of boiling brown mud atop a mountain all of white.
3. Look into the coffee, make a wish, for what better liquid suited to wishing that which comes from such sacred beans?
4. Jack must be upset, his magic beans ground up and drinkable or can we still reach the land of giants with a cup?
5. Pompei in a cup, Starbucks deals in history now.

© 2010 Christian K. Martinez