As mentioned in my last post, I’m posting my writing exercises from my first night in the fiction writing course I’m taking. I dont think they’re bad given we only had ten minutes to complete them. I did sneak in a little bit of revising during some slow moments in class, but otherwise I am posting them ‘as is.’
For the first assignment, the teacher gave us three random sentences he co-opted from NPR’s Web site and asked us to write a short scene using one of the sentences. I’ve bolded the sentence I chose. I’ll post the second exercise in my next post.
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I had a forkful of fettucine alfredo in my mouth, and I wasn’t quite sure I heard her right at first. I was immersed in the process of eating, in that phase of dinner where I was operating on sheer instinct, where breaths were merely an option, with my head focused on the plate in front of me and my movements picking up steam with each bite. I slurped up one of the remaining noodles hanging from my mouth, wiped with the back of my hand a bit of cream that had gathered on my lips, and looked up at her.
Man, just how old was that picture, I wondered, the one she had had the nerve to upload as an accurate representation of her present self, the self that was now bubbling and spilling over the wooden chair across from me. If the answer couldn’t be measured in years, it certainly could be in pounds.
“Excuse me, what you’d say?”
“I just asked you what you thought of my dress. I just bought it the other day and I’m not sure how well it fits,” she said, flashing a shaky smile that revealed her lack of confidence in the answer.
“It’s beautiful.” I swallowed a bit of noodle. “I noticed it the second I saw you. Where’d you get it?”
Her smile became a bit larger, the edges of her teeth appearing. Then she lowered her head, her cheeks reddening, obviously embarrassed by my compliment, but also wholly believing it as well. And I noted to myself, I may just get lucky tonight. You see, one of the things that lying does is, it may not have a lot of ethical virtues, but it has a lot of functional virtues. Especially when you’re a serial dater.
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