Word Shot # 1

Word Shot is a weekly exercise from TheWritersBag.com. Every Monday a random photo is posted, and you can write a sentence or a paragraph or a story describing the photo and enter it as a comment; you can also (constructively) criticize the comments of others, if that's your thing. It's a wicked fun way of getting your creativity moving, and I had lots of fun doing this first one. Oh yeah; the site's owner, Steve Osborne, will pick one winner at the end of the week. This week's prize is free copies of his e-manuals on writing. Man, I wanna win. XD

Steve kindly allowed me to post the photo and my story-comment here; here it is, for your enjoyment. :D



Sand. Sand everywhere. It covered the quarry beside the town in tall gray mounds and snaking rivulets, as if some god-child had been playing in his own cosmic sandbox with real buildings and a factory whose tall smoke stack spewed real, putrid smoke. Above dark clouds hovered sluggishly; the only sunlight that could filter through them was wan and gloomy, making the quarry look like a gray wasteland. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought that I was in the set of some apocalyptic movie instead of on the weedy hill at the outskirts of San Mateo, the town I grew up in.

My sister Lena stood mutely beside me. Her hand was clenched around my small fingers in an uncommonly tight grip; I could barely feel the softness of her palm. She was staring at a little brown box beyond a wall-like mound of sand. When I squinted at it I could dimly recognize the squat outline of Ma’s apartment building. Lena had hurried me out of bed and through the door while Ma was snoring loudly on the table, her half-empty glass of bourbon sitting quietly beside her head. I wanted to call out to her and say goodbye, but in my heart of hearts I knew better than to wake her up after she’d been drinking. Her screams and blows echoed in my mind as we stood in silence for several minutes on the hill facing the quarry. At that time I wanted to scream too, but no sound would form inside my throat.

When Lena said, “It’s time to go,” I nodded and followed her over the other side of the hill. Neither of us looked back as we made our way down the barren path.

The Bud

This is an entry for Scribbit's August Write-Away Contest :) It took me all of a couple of hours to write this in pencil in my notebook, I guess I was on a roll...all comments and criticisms are welcome, especially constructive ones :D Enjoy.


One time I decided to sit on one of the stone benches near the university's main library to clear my head. The padded straps of my backpack bit into my shoulders with urgency; the worn rubber soles of my shoes padded quickly over the grass that grew between two fatherly acacia trees, their boughs shading the bench I was rapidly approaching. With one smooth motion I slung my backpack off my shoulder and plopped thankfully into one of the U-shaped recesses on the bench. I unzipped my backpack, pulled out a bottle of bland apple-flavored tea, took a couple of long swigs and emitted a sonorous belch. Then, rather self-consciously, I turned to my left and saw her.

If I hadn't turned around I may not have noticed her at all. She had short, unkempt hair that stopped abruptly just below her ears; it looked as if it had been laid out on a block and shorn with a power saw. She kept her gaze fixed on some anonymous patch of weeds in the sunken field directly in front of us. Her head was bent slightly and her hair hung over half of her face, like a bead curtain. She seemed entirely oblivious to my stare, and for a while I was too. Behind the curtain of hair I could glimpse the profile of an exquisite apricot eye, a small Malay nose and full lips lying in a matter-of-fact line on her face. Her skin was the pale brown of parched earth. My mouth went dry, as if I had not downed half a 500mL bottle of diluted tea a few minutes before.

We sat in silence for the next half hour. She could have been an immensely lifelike statue carved by a mischievous sculptor if not for the rhythmic, almost invisible rise and fall of her shoulders and the occasional flutter of her hair from the breeze. Her close-fitting T-shirt was the nascent pink of a little flower that grows in the cracks of a cement sidewalk, her jeans the faded blue of many nameless journeys. As I sat there, lost in my own thoughts, I compared her to the many anonymous girls I passed by in the corridors of Engineering. She could have been any one of them, except for one thing: she lacked their vibrance and purpose. She sat here, moored in her own little universe, whereas those Engineering girls were laughing on the benches of their organizations' allotted hang-outs, or walking briskly toward the stairs right after a class. She stayed still while the rest of us flowed with time, living and loving. In my heart I pitied her, but I could think of nothing to say.

When I got up and left without a word I cursed myself for being so helpless. I threw the half-empty bottle into the nearest cement garbage receptacle with more force than I thought I possessed. She stayed in the back of my mind for the rest of the day, patiently waiting. That night I resolved to go back the next day and strike up a conversation.

She was already there when I arrived, sitting in the exact same place with the exact same pose. Only the color of her T-shirt was different - the soft green of new grass. Tentatively I sat down, easing my butt onto the cold red stone with too much care. Although I hadn't been to church in months I prayed fervently that I wouldn't fart. She ignored my nervousness with singular indifference; I could have been a dead leaf that had fallen from a nearby tree, for all my troubles. Nevertheless I plowed on. I inhaled deeply, closed my eyes, opened them again to gaze at the people playing frisbee in the sunken field, and began to talk.

I wasn't talking about anything in particular. I just said the first things that came into my head: flunking the midterms, cramming papers, getting drunk at the open-air watering hole my friends frequented. My stories were probably dull, the kind of things that happen to almost everybody on a regular basis. Excerpts from the archives of any of my friends' blogs, with different actors in each predetermined role. I considered myself a nobody in those stories, the nameless narrator who recorded the antics of others. Even so I had been there; each event was burned into my memory, and indication of my existence at that particular time. Perhaps it was this that I was trying to share with her. My life force, my vital energy. I scoured my reserves for anecdotes and insights until evening dimmed the surroundings and I realized that I had been silent for several minutes. The U-shaped recess beside me was empty, the red stone cold to my fingers.

I trudged back to my dormitory in a state of lightheaded weariness. I felt like I had run a 5-kilometer marathon with weights strapped onto my wrists and ankles. I sagged onto the thin foam mattress of my bed and slept after barely shrugging off my backpack. I dreamed of a solitary flower bud growing amidst the mossy stones set into the sidewalk in front of Engineering. There was a large gash in the palm of my hand. I crouched beside the little bud, letting the scarlet drops flow straight into the puckered mouth of petals. With each drop the bud grew fuller and more brilliant; its petals were opening ever so gradually. I knew that I had been crouching there for a long time - I knew my knees were ready to buckle - but I hung on stubbornly. I wanted to see the flower unfurl its scarlet petals, scarlet as the jagged lips that had torn my palm asunder.

I went back to the bench several times over the next few weeks, but she wasn't there any more. Sometimes I would sit in her spot, trying to locate the weeds she had been staring at on the day that I had met her. All I could see were lush green grasses that stretched on and on throughout the sunken field.

Once, while heading for the bench, I was surprised to see an unfamiliar girl sitting in her spot. At first I felt indignant, almost wanting to drive away the intruder. Upon closer inspection my heart began to palpitate wildly; I knew that lithe form, those dark locks. Her skin had grown rich and earthy; her clothes seemed fresh and lively, although she had not traded her T-shirts and jeans for anything else. With great trepidation I divested myself of my backpack and crept quietly into the seat next to hers. This time she turned and smiled the most radiant smile I had ever laid eyes on.

My mouth hung open, and I found myself mumbling an incoherent "Hi." She said nothing; her smile washed over me, and I basked in the glow of her presence. She leaned closer - so much closer - and soon I felt a pleasant, unknown wetness on my lips, sweet as the dew on silken petals.

An Excuse for Writing

[I'm currently in the Algorithms and Complexity lab, typing this out on one of the lab's computers. There's only me and Ate Jas, one of the graduate students. I'm a bit embarrassed - this is the first time I'm using one of the computers (and the free internet connection) for something that isn't related to my thesis, but I guess that will wear off after a while. :)]

This is my first semester taking a Creative Writing (CW) course that isn't a GE. Unlike CW 10, which can be credited as one of the Arts and Humanities GEs that everyone has to take fifteen or so units of, my current subject, CW 140, is an elective; the only students who take it are mostly from the College of Arts and Letters, where its home department is located. The first day I walked into the class I felt like an astronaut visiting an uncharted planet; I was already sure, even if I hadn't seen the class list, that I was the only Engineering student there. I felt inferior in some way, ill-equipped; all my classmates, especially the CW majors, had had their formal training. I, on the other hand, was a wannabe, a dreamer who had been waylaid from her desired path and was, in some small way, trying to make up for it. I had no clue what I was in for.

After a month of writing short personal essays with fluctuating quality in my free time, I find myself enjoying the exercises. Personal essays are quite similar to blog posts; the main difference between them, as far as I've come to understand, is the informality of the latter. Many blog posts are more akin to journal entries, with their air of intimacy and confidence. These posts can be about the most mundane of things; in general, blog posts are often not expected to be coherent, or to deliver a point. An essay, on the other hand, is well-structured and full of insights - the people who read it expect to come away with something: a bit of trivia, a vicarious experience, a new idea. Of course, a blog post can also be a personal essay; some of the better blogs out there are the ones we read because we want to find out about someone's experiences and views, not because we indulge in the minutiae of her life. While thinking about what to write for my exercises I often think of things that, if I weren't so lazy, I could probably post here. Which is kind of strange, when I think about it; if I like writing enough to take a CW elective, why don't I just write whenever I have time? Why the procrastination?

I can't definitively answer this question, but it seems that some writers share a similar quirk. I've read about published authors who love to put off the work involved in writing a novel; they do their chores, go grocery-shopping, take their families out to dinner, that kind of thing. As one author put it, writers like to have written - writing involves a lot of thinking, restructuring, analysis, editing, and so on, and the maddening rarity of inspiration can drive one to long bouts with frustration. One of the reasons why writing is called a craft is the discipline required to go through the repetitive, often fruitless motions of writing and rewriting; it has to be done regularly in order for one to acquire skill and technique, and one has to keep nourishing one's Muse with good literature, since writers are also the anonymous students of other authors. It's quite tempting to just wing it and write whenever inspiration strikes. I've been writing this way for years, and so far I have only slightly improved. Hence my signing up for English and CW classes, first the GEs that everyone takes, and now, with a little step-up of confidence, a CW elective. So far it's been great being told what to write and being given free advice. My main problem would be continuing to write once classes are over and I'm left on my own again.

Hmmm, maybe I should update this blog more often. There must be a million things that I can write about, and God knows I need the practice. :)

[It's already past 7 in the evening, and I'm the only one left in the lab. Ate Jas left about an hour ago. The corridors are awfully quiet... Have to go home now. XP]