I have a lot of trouble spelling “exercise” sometimes…

Anyway, this quarter I’m taking Creative Writing I. Which I love. Oh how I love it. It’s a purely online class, which is good, because I can work on it wherever I wish and that’s always nice for an author. Today’s assignment was to first crank out ten “concrete, significant details” about your location - that is, details that can help you imagine the object being described very clearly, by appealing to your senses. You were also to include two metaphors and two similes, and label them. The second part was to write a poem. About food. It’s supposed to be in a certain format, and very short, so it wasn’t too difficult, and it was quite fun.

Below, I allow you to gaze upon my raw and unedited work. These are ALL the details and poems I came up with, from which I picked my favorites. Just thought you might like to see something of this sort.

The way I did this was, I wrote a series of paragraphs describing objects in my room or environment, then picked out the pieces whose details I thought were best. Some details I was able to make all on their own, though.

Tucked away neatly between the white, faded box that was his Nintendo DS and a dirtied old white telephone, on top of a stack of ignored letters and envelopes, was one of the rare marks of color on the desk – half of a plastic christmas tree ornament.The basket sat as a mark of Easter come and gone; the collage of little geoids, like a tye-dye T-shirt, lay in an unorganized pile in the basket, most of them in pieces. Thrown in with the plastic shells were discarded candy wrappers whose sheen lit up the eggs under the bed’s shadow.The CDs were neatly arranged in a box, with slots that you could fit their cases into. They were staggered and angled so that there was no pattern or order to their insertion; some pointed here, some pointed there.

The tower fan stood mute against the wall, its power cord curled at its base like a cat’s tail around its feet.
(Simile)

The boy’s walls were unusually bare for his age. Where others might have posters or papers or even just a color of wallpaper, he had solid white and five posters. One was a relic from elementary school; the paper was a torn and faded piece of parchment from aeons passed by. Another was a map of the land of Middle Earth, whose clay mountains and paper trees almost made it look like the world was mounted on his wall. Here was a poster of dragons; on the push-pins holding the poster up were mounted a lonely and forgotten ornament of hearts and an out-of-place carving of snowmen carolers. They hung still and silent, dwarfed by the contents of the poster between them. Here was a work of art, another relic – this from middle school; at a distance its repeated pattern is a marvel. Up close its imperfection is torture. Finally, against the door was the most well-regarded and respected poster in the room – Rush’s Snakes and Arrows tour poster.
(metaphor)

At the top of the desk were a steel soldier clan in washers and screws, and a plush dragon whose scales sparkled brightly here and there in the synthetic light. They stood as mute watchers over the room, governers of all they saw.
(metaphors)

The base of the bed was the overhanging edge of a mountainside, under which a traveling band of game cartridges had collected and took shelter from the storm of their owner’s feet.
(Metaphor/s)

Candy wrappers, mostly of silver foil that glowed in the light, littered the floor like popcorn spilled from its bowl.
(Simile)

Random pottery creations from ages past lined the desk’s top shelf, like a museum exhibit showing some old civilization’s history: little clay pots here, a boat there, and finally a tower that might have been intended to be great, but was really rather shrunken and lopsided.
(Simile)

The room had an eerie silence to it – a silence that guests felt a need to fill, broken only by the gentle hum of the laptop and the ceiling fan.

The bookshelf was a light shade of brown, perhaps made of cherry wood; atop it was, most prominently, a plant that might have been thriving if it wasn’t made of plastic. There were mostly disregarded game packages from Christmas come and gone that sat a pile next to the plant. On the shelves themselves a variety of books made their home, gathering shadows and dust over the ages. One shelf used a silver train-bank as a bookend; another used a stack of more video game packages.

In one of the bare walls was a circular dent, like a mark etched in deep bedrock that denoted some major occurrence in time – but left the actual occurrence up to the imagination of the beholder.
(Simile)

The garbage can hid behind a small black amp and the desk itself, crouched in the shadows of the shelf and coats above it, like a thief that melted into the scenery around it, invisible.
(Simile)

A tangle of cords, like wicked black snakes, lay coiled at the foot of the desk, a sinister collection of objects and connectors that might be useful now and again but mostly just stayed, unused and twined hopelessly.
(Simile!)

Pineapple

Leather minefields
In a tropical bush.
We disable the mines
And digest sweet soil.

Fettucine

Flanged ribbons
In a wide-rimmed bowl.
We untie the knots
And eat the ribbon.

Mashed ‘Taters

Snowy mounds
Proud in their bowl.
We melt the snow
And shovel it away.