Basic Fiction Exercises

Inspiration Exercise: Look through a tabloid magazine and choose the most outrageous article you can find.  Is the president meeting with aliens?  Has a woman given birth to Bigfoot’s child?  Read the article and think of your own story idea.  How would you turn it into a story of your own? 

Beginnings Exercise: The following is a list of famous first lines (from popular novels.)  Choose one and begin writing your own story.

• If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born . . .  The Catcher in the Rye (1951), J. D. Salinger
• Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett), Leo Tolstoy
• It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.  1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (1949), George Orwell
• When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.  To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Harper Lee
• All children, except one, grow up.  Peter Pan (1911), J.M. Barrie
• The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.  Murphy (1938), Samuel Beckett
• This is the saddest story I have ever heard.  The Good Soldier (1915), Ford Madox Ford
• A screaming comes across the sky.  Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Thomas Pynchon
• It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.  City of Glass (1985), Paul Auster
• Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.  The Stranger, or The Outsider (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert), Albert Camus
• The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.  Neuromancer (1984), William Gibson
• I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.  Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz), Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Where now? Who now? When now?  The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles), Samuel Beckett
• All this happened, more or less.  Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut
• Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.  The Debut (1981), Anita Brookner
• It was the day my grandmother exploded.  The Crow Road (1992), Iain M. Banks

Endings Exercise: Read the following short story.  The ending has been purposely left out.  Create your own ending.  It can be as long or as short as it needs to be: a sentence, a paragraph, a page.  It’s entirely up to you.  The author’s ending is on the following page for those interested in seeing how the author chose to end this piece.

The Wig
By Brady Udall

My eight-year-old son found a wig in the garbage dumpster this morning. I walked into the kitchen, highly irritated that I couldn't make a respectable knot in my green paisley tie, and there he was at the table, eating cereal and reading the funnies, the wig pulled tightly over his hair like a football helmet. The wig was a dirty bush of curly blonde hair, the kind you might see on a prostitute or someone who is trying to imitate Marilyn Monroe.

I asked him where he got the wig and he told me, his mouth full of cereal. When I advised him that we do not wear things we find in the garbage, he simply continued eating and reading as if he didn't hear me. I wanted him to take that wig off, but I couldn't ask him to do it. I forgot all about my tie and going to work. I looked out the window where a mist fell slowly on the street. I paced into the living room and back, trying hard not to look at my son. He ignored me. I could hear him munching cereal and rustling paper. There was a picture--or a memory, real or imagined, that I couldn't get out of my mind. Last spring, before the accident, my wife was sitting in the chair where now my son always sits. She was reading the paper, to see how the Blackhawks did the night before, and her sleep-mussed hair was only slightly longer and darker than the hair of my son's wig.

I wondered whether my son had a similar picture in his head or if he had a picture at all. I watched him and he finally looked up at me . . .

 

The Author’s ending

But his face was blank. He went back to his reading. I walked around the table, picked him up and held him against my chest. I pressed my nose into that wig, and it smelled not like the clean shampoo scent I might have been hoping for, but like old lettuce. I suppose it didn't matter at that point. My son put his smooth arms around my neck and for maybe a few seconds, we were together again, the three of us. [4]