You Oxymoron

Use a dozen of these lovely phrases (like "she was gaily grieving" or "he had many pleasing pains") to describe a large oxymoron--a person, place, or event. The thing you're looking for in a good oxymoron is the surprise of the connections.
(from prompt #41 in The 3AM Epiphany)

Read my response:


"door number 1" by tanjatiziana



Before the interview I prayed like the devil for God knows what: luck, confidence, something that could instigate a permanent change of life for me. Everyone tried encouraging me, telling me to act natural, to just be myself. Whatever that means, because if I were to act natural I’m not sure it would be myself, and lately what felt natural is more ostrich than human. Inside I just wanted to hide from the outside world, filled as it is with voices telling me what I ought and ought not to want, but I’d been stuck inside so long that what I wanted most was fresh air. Handing a stranger a single sheet of paper declaring my value made me hyperventilate, which is a generous exchange when it comes to being able to breathe.

When they asked me why I’d had such an extended experience with temporary employment, as I figured they would, I had some prepared answer about personal business that could demonstrate maturity and responsibility. Something I could say that sounded more dignified than the truth, that it had been a pretty ugly year, spent hiding my head in the sands of time and debt piling up on me.

I know better than to admit some things, I know that leaving things unsaid saves others the trouble of pretending things are gonna be okay. We’d gone out to the cliffs the week before I left and looked out at the edge, silent and alone together on a clear summer day. The only words I remember were asking whats wrong with me, but I’m not sure who asked, it’s the same difference whichever of us did. The answer both of us knew without saying was, nothing you can fix. At a close distance the surf beat against the wall we were standing on, over and over, in big swells of water and in small laps, but from where we were we couldn’t see anything but the wide stretch of water resting fitfully around us, as far as we could see and farther. Just the deep Pacific, dark blue and torrid against a calm cloudless sky, and neither of us could appreciate the dueling expanses because we were just trying not to talk about much we couldn’t say. When we left the cliffs something had changed in an instant but we didn’t realize it for months.

It surprised me one day, about a year ago, to comprehend my ignorance, to understand that things always change. That day, a Tuesday, I woke up with dreams and went to bed without them. I felt numb. And the shock stuck to me and gathered and grew, like all things electric it made the natural appear unnatural and my thoughts were conducted accordingly. Mostly misdirected, searching for something to connect with, my thoughts circled round themselves straight to nowhere. Thinking so much about my meaningless life was the most destructive action, it nearly killed me trying to figure out how to live.

After I got the job, my boss mentioned in passing what I’d done that had stayed with her, that had gotten me hired. She said that, luckily, it was the confident manner in which I spoke, thanks to my habit of taking two deep breaths before speaking or even reacting. She said I was living proof that sometimes you just need to remember to breathe, but of course its just the opposite. Remembering to breathe being proof of living.

Friendship

Write a 500 word story about friendship in response to the paragraph below from Samuel Beckett's Proust. I hope you notice what a lyrically dark view of friendship Beckett (and by extension Proust) has. You need not share Beckett's view, but I hope a little poison leaks into the otherwise sunny world the word friendship usually evokes.

But if love, for Proust, is a function of man's sadness, friendship is a function of his cowardice; and if neither can be realized because of the impenetrability (isolation) of all this is not "cosa mentale," at least the failure to possess may have all the nobility of that which is tragic, whereas to communicate where no communication is possible is merely simian vulgarity, or horribly comic, like the madness that holds a conversation with furniture. Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned. Friendship implies an almost piteous acceptance of face values.

(from prompt #32 in The 3AM Epiphany)

Read my response:


"Walking Man takes his licks" by katmere


On his 30th birthday, Chris woke up late in his bedroom. His black out blinds kept his room in his preferred cave-like state, and so when he emerged he always acted a bit like a bear. Territorially, he lumbered into the kitchen—his kitchen, but also the kitchen of his three other roommates—and pawed through the cupboards looking for cereal. Someone ate his cereal. On his goddamn birthday, when all he wanted was a goddamn bowl of Cheerios.

On his best friend’s 30th birthday, Luke woke up early in his bedroom. His room had a door that led to the yard, and he left the door open during warm evenings so that his dog could wander out, and so ladies could wander in. Or out. He took his dog out for a walk, showered, and helped himself to some Cheerios.

Chris knew, for months, that his 30th birthday would be the worst day of his life. He knew because months ago he’d received an invitation to attend the wedding of the only girl he’d ever wanted to marry. The man whose name was engraved above hers was a wealthy orthodontist, and Chris’ teeth were fucked up and made him self-conscious about smiling. They were getting married on his birthday, and he did not have a date. There was a girl he wouldn’t mind taking, and she was, of course, Luke’s date. Chris was assured he would have a good time, which only made him more sure that he would not.

Luke knew that weddings suck, most of the time, so he was going for the free booze and for Chris. Luke didn’t have a really firm grasp on it all, but Chris had stared at the invitation, hung on the fridge with a Domino’s magnet, every single night for a significant amount of time. Chris had also been ordering pizza a lot more, but even Luke could see that as a symptom, not a cause. So for whatever reason, Luke canceled the surprise party he’d planned—a couple of guys from college could fly out, and they could go to the strip club and the Indian casino—and dry-cleaned his suit. Clearly it meant something to Chris, and it might be kinda lame but Luke was guaranteed to get laid, at least.

Standing in front of the mirror in his bedroom, Chris tried to hold his back straight. At least this evening, he didn’t want to slouch. He heard a girl giggle in Luke’s room, and he swallowed a mouthful of air as he walked out to the front porch. They had a cab waiting, and as Luke and their adorable neighbor, in a backless dress and kitten heels, joined him outside, Chris had a sudden urge to lay down under the back tires and feel his skull crushed by the weight of 30 years of life. Instead, he stood up straight, let out a low whistle of appreciation for the backless dress and kitten heels, and slapped his best friend’s shoulder to signal that he was ready to go.

Names/Exes

"Alphabets" by kvanhorn

Take the full name (including middle name) of someone you love. Write down as many words from this name as you can. You can repeat letters from the name as many times as you wish. Treat the letters of this name as the only letters in a new alphabet. You cannot use any words containing letters that do not exist in this name. Because this is so difficult, you'll probably only be able to come up with about 200 words for this exercise--that's okay. When you have built a sufficient list of words (maybe breaking the list down into nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc.) write a fragment of fiction that has to do with a fictionalized situation this person, or someone like this person, would be involved in.
(from prompt #25 in The 3 AM Epiphany)

and/or

As an alternative to "Names," use the letters of the first names of four or five ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends as your only alphabet for a very short story. The effect of this change, (from "Names") when I tried just the list of words (not the exercise) myself, was electric. See if you can look back to earlier failed relationships with something like affection--or at least some balance.
(from prompt #26 in The 3 AM Epiphany)

Read my commentary on these prompts:


Look, I did do it, okay? Ask my roommates: I sat around with this list of words, obsessively organized into parts of speech (at the conjunction junction, I was incredibly grateful for my TWO highly functioning words: "if" and "and") and I wrote a silly little story involving barf, and running (although I couldn't use the word "running," just the form "ran"). I used my baby brother's name, which gave me this alphabet:

ABDEFIKNRVZ

Please note the lack of any of the letters given to the finalist trying to make a phrase at the bonus end section of "Wheel of Fortune." No 's,' no 't,' no kind little 'm' or 'y.' No, I couldn't even make the word 'no.'

I also started to do the one with ex-boyfriends, which would actually have been way easier. That alphabet, in comparison, is awesome:

ABCDEIKLMNOST

Until you remember that in normal life, you get all the letters. Unrestricted! Weird experience, to be sure. I had such gratitude for letters, for the use of words. Weird, but rewarding.

The reward is not necessarily what it produced in writing, however, and that put me in an awkward position. The writing that came out of this felt silly, gimmicky, and I wasn't sure how to post it. Kiteley, in The 3 AM Epiphany, said as much elsewhere in the prompt: "happy for the difficulty and the experience but...failed at a proper piece of fiction." His advice was to let it gestate, unmolested (so, very, very much like a child, I guess) and in a few YEARS look back at it. Great, but I'm posting every week, and I'm itching to start at #27 and #28. I was just gonna skip over them, but it was weird how much it felt like I was breaking my own rules. Coincidentally, this prompt was inspired by the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians who meet in Paris to create almost impossible restraints; one description is "rats who build the maze from which they plan to escape." And here I am starting to feel like that with my own blog.

So, what you've just read was the solution to my self-created problem. I do recommend trying both prompts. I had to fight my self from dismissing these, as in, aw, this is just a game, not real writing, doesn't count. But, as I'm also choosing to look at each prompt as a lesson, it does count. (Plus slippery slope, if don't do one cause it doesn't appeal to me, how am I gonna stay disciplined to do any of them?) The lesson in this is really the heart of creativity: what do you do with what you have? Anyone can find a way to fill a blank canvas, but can anyone still find a way to create art without paint, or even a canvas? It was looking at the myriad meanings of common words, and at the power of rare ones, using each one carefully. A trite metaphor, but a lot like stringing beads together, looking at each word as a little bead, and evaluating its worth and where it belonged. So, yay for that. Meanwhile, do I post all the words I had (175 words) to use, do I post a story that is sort of adorable in its repetitive nothingness? (Sample sentence: "A barn, deer, fern: an errand in Eden.") Kiteley wrote that the voice used in this exercise is so forced, so unnatural, that it seems useless, but that, with patience, that becomes precisely the use: it teaches you to use something unnatural, a voice besides your own, which a good writer should be able to produce.

If anyone does try this and create something super cool, please please e-mail me at ehbarnard (at) hotmail (dot) com or leave a comment, and I will post that bad boy on up here.

Also, I recommend loving someone named like, Molly Bonnie Moorehousecricketski, or something.