Short Story Awesomeness

Sep 11, 2009 16:00

I've been working part-time on and off at Kaplan Aspect, a school in Philly that offers ESL classes during the mornings and early afternoons. We had a workshop today with a creative writing exercise that was totally awesome.

The exercise starts with a single sentence as a writing prompt for a short story. Writers have a few minutes to finish the paragraph, cover up the first paragraph so no one can see it, then give the next writer a new prompt by writing the first sentence of the next paragraph. Do this a couple of times, and you have a weird story. The REAL goal here is to have the students edit the result for grammatical inconsistencies (of which there will be a ton) as a group. But the raw product's also grossly entertaining.

This was written by a bunch of ESL teachers trying to write like students, intentionally making grammar and vocabulary mistakes. Grammatical mistakes here are intentional. The shift in italics indicates a writer shift.

Without further ado, I hereby present to you an unnamed story.

The last time I saw her was a cold day in February. Her pet monkey Rocco perched on her shoulder sneering at me. That damn monkey was the only she ever love.

"I knew it would come to this", she mused, toying with the grenade that hung Rocco's diamond-studded collar. Rocco ran frantically around in circles for trying to get the collar off.

He ran into a building that was on fire. But he felt no pain when he got inside. The house was like a hotter summer. This was not what he expected.

He was expect to burn very quickly. At least that's what I hoped. He was instead made of flame-retardant clothes. I covered him in gas much more and lit him with flame on fire. Still he no burned. And then he rose to the sky. It turned out he was an immortal god from the planet Saturn.

The End
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