Rotten First Drafts (Marnie and AJ)

[Daniel Taylor]

Daniel sat at his desk going over his lesson materials. The empty desks were being taken as students arrived to class. Once his students settled in, Danni started class. “Alright class, let’s begin. Please get out your writing journals.” Danni stood up to address his class. “Today I will assign a writing project, but first we are going to start with a seven minutes write.” Danni turned and went to the white board to write the prompt for the seven minutes write.

Seven Minutes Write
Walking home, you find a shoe on the side of the road. What kind of shoe is it? Who is its owner? What happened? Why is the shoe there? Where is the other shoe now? You can use all of these questions or just one to explore what happened.

“There are two rules. Rule one is that you only have seven minutes. Rule two is to keep your pencil moving. Don’t stop your pencil, even if your writing seems like you are all over place. I’ll set a timer,” Danni picked up the timer from his desk. He set it to seven minutes. “This is to get the creative juices following before you start your assign. You may begin.”

Danni pushed start. He sat down at his desk to do the writing warm up. It will be interesting what his students will come up with. The same prompt but many different minds that will write different things. Writing is a good way for Danni to learn and get to know his students.

[Marnie Sullivan]

This far into the semester, Marnie still had mixed feelings about Mr. Taylor's creative writing class. Sure, she liked Mr. Taylor well enough, and a lot of the prompts they got to work with were fun. But it hadn't been quite what she'd expected.

That was mostly an issue with herself, though, to be honest. As much time as she spent reading, and as confident as she was in her ability to write a paper, Marnie had figured that creative writing would come easily. Instead, during warm-ups like the seven minutes write, she often found herself hesitating, trying to pull the perfect work out of the air instead of getting as much on paper as she could.

Today, though, she felt good about this prompt. Marnie didn't need to search all day for an idea because a very famous abandoned shoe came immediately to mind: Cinderella's glass slipper.

But she couldn't just go retelling the fairy tale as it was. She needed to dress it up somehow... Well, the prompt explicitly asked what kind of shoe it was. Maybe punk-rock Cinderella lost a Doc Marten after a shoe? Or, no, it was a track star Cinderella who ran right out of her sneaker!

Inspired, Marnie began scribbling furiously into her notebook. She had a good feeling about this one.

[Amanda Joy "AJ" Lane]

Despite how things had been going as of lately for AJ, creative writing class was her outlet. Mr. Taylor's prompts were what she lived for. It wasn't the first creative writing class she'd taken, but it was the first one she'd taken at Hammel. It was the perfect distraction. AJ had always enjoyed writing, just as much as reading, but since she'd came to Hammel, it seemed that she'd only had her nose in books and hadn't picked up a pen and let her imagination go wild as she pressed it to the paper. So this was forcing her to do that.

She didn't know what she was going to write when she pressed her pen to the paper of her notebook. It was college-ruled as she was very particular about that, but it started to form on the paper in front of her.

She was walking down the street on the side of the road. There wasn't a sidewalk, only black top stretching out before her. It was broad daylight and the shoe on the side of the road looked vaguely familiar as her eyes set upon it. She knew where she was in this story. Minnesota, back home and this was the same path she took home from high school, back when she hadn't been a meta yet of course. Her vision focused on the shoe again. It was a ballet flat, black with a bow on the toe. And it was hers.

The realization of what she was writing made AJ stop for a moment, her pen faltering just slightly on the page, as much as she tried to keep it moving. She was finding her own shoe. And she'd only ever had one of the ballet flats after the night of the dance, not knowing where the other had gone and now it had showed up on the side of the road in her imagination.

She looked back and forth between the girl sitting next to her, who was scribbling in her notebook. She was sure it was probably completely a work of fiction for her, so why did the things AJ tried to escape from show up even in her writing where she strove to get away from them?

[Daniel Taylor]

The timer beeped after the seven minutes. Daniel turned off timer. “Finish up your last thoughts.”

He picked up a pile of blank white computer paper. He walked around the classroom passing out the paper to his students. Daniel explained the assignment as he went.

“You’ll be writing a setting story. The setting can be anywhere, a place where you have been or a made-up place. I want you to really paint your setting. Make the reader feel as if they were actually there.”

Daniel walked the front of the classroom to put the remaining papers on his desk. He continued, “With the paper I passed out I would like you to draw your setting. Just a rough sketch of what your setting looks like. It will help with the writing process.” He looked around the classroom. “Feel free to bounce ideas around with your peers.”

Daniel erased the board. He then walked around the classroom again asking each student what setting they think they are going to use.

Daniel stopped by Marnie and AJ. “Have any ideas, ladies?”