Join this GROUP WRITING PROMPT – an example of exercise 101
This is one of my favourite exercises. It always works.
All you have to do is go to page 101 of a novel selected at random and find the first sentence that doesn’t mention a name or a place or a detail that nails you down to a particular era. That sentence now become your first line.
I got this one from Joseph Heller’s Good As Gold. All you have to do is carry on. You can write as much as you like, but you can’t have another go until someone else chips in. (I might also contribute from time to time because it is so hard to resist.)
Having taken a vow of silence, he kept it.
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BACK TO CREATIVE WRITING SCHOOL — 120+ reviews on Amazon and over 75% gave it five stars
A Good Confession
"Unputdownable" Miriam Stoppard
BRIDGET WHELAN writer 
As tempting as it was. For example, when his mother showed up at his door after fifteen years to tell him leaving his father was the worsrt mistake she ever made. By that he knew she meant another one of her endless string of loser boyfriends bailed on her and left her broke and with no source of income, and this time none of his sisters would take her call.
Within fifteen minutes she began commenting on how well he must be doing, considering the Benz in his garage, the Mac Book air and three networked computers he used to produce his documentaries, not to mention the fact that he later caught her looking theough his closet and clothes where he used to keep loose cash when he was younger.
It had been three years since anyone had knocked on Percy Walker’s door with an over-cheerful smile that made him assume they were selling Jesus. It wasn’t God being hawked today but solar panels and the opportunity to purchase a ‘5.2 kilowatt Advantage Package with estimated electricity savings of between two and $3ooo per annum’. It takes exactly seven seconds for silence to shift into awkward but the type Percy was about to offer up would be as long as a freight train and as deep as a philosophers textbook.
The young man who stood at the door holding a blue clipboard was tall – over six foot Percy estimated – with piercing blue eyes and curly hair. He wore an open neck shirt and blue denims, with two matching braided leather wrist bands completing the uber casual, ‘laugh-at-any-jokes-the-customer-says-whether-they- are-funny-or-not’ salesperson look.
After the initial greeting and inquiry as to whether he was the home owner or not – to which Percy had offered his first strategically delivered nod – Mr ‘Return on Investment’ had not stopped talking, launching straight into his best ‘this offer is for a limited time only’ spiel complete with brochure flowcharts and cost comparison diagrams.
“The energy storage subsidies that accompany this particular unit are due to finish at the end of the month after which the government feed-in tariffs are also set to change, making not only the running costs but also the installation costs substantially higher after this period,” he jabbered while showing impressively white teeth and taking care to remain likable all the while.
Skilfully, Percy had managed to dodge the salesman’s attempts to find out how much money he earnt with some no nonsense, well-aimed furrowing of the brow and narrowing of the eyes. Yet he began to sense the longer he stayed with the door open engaging in this one-sided dialogue the more his silent act stretched thinner and thinner, like a balloon blown big, until the temptation to rupture it might become too great to resist.
So sorry. My contribution is in response to the original prompt, not Phillips.
When I began composing it no one had yet carried on the story but by the time I finished my paragraphs (about 40 minutes later) and had pressed send – without going back to check the homepage – Phillips was ‘magically’ already there.
Regrettably it’s probably a little bit early in the story to be breaking off into subplots, so once again apologies. Awkward silence indeed..
No problem – we have two intriguing story starters – let’s use both. I’ve created a new post with your starter Glen. This one is for Philip’s. I’ll have a go myself now…
Robert closed his eyes and an afterimage formed on the back of his eyelids. Strangely yet not entirely inappropriately it was of a teapot. Next to the teapot lay a common kettle. And the teapot was talking to the kettle. Not so much talking as insulting. “Shabby grey. Shabby grey. Shabby grey.” Repeating. Over and over again.
There was no denying it. Robert and his mother had history. If that seems an odd statement to make given the nature of any maternal relationship then you’ve not heard the half of it. A stinking truth was that the only kiss Robert had ever received from his mother as a boy growing up was the day she’d written the brevity- advising acronym K.I.S.S below one of his 5th grade attempts at story writing. It had been a sour brown childhood in a great many respects.
There were so many things he wanted to say right now to her. Things that needed saying. But only two days into his week long vow of silence he wasn’t about to break it now. He aimed to win the bet and collect the money – all of it. To the untrained eye it may have seemed like he had some of the material trappings of success but it was, like so many other things in his life, a false mirror. A reflection that looking into would on many occasions cause the elevator inside him to begin falling with dizzying speed.
Roberts daydreaming came to an abrupt end when his mothers voice came crashing into the room like an icebreaker. “So what do have to say for yourself? And look at me when I’m talking to you for Pete’s sake!”
I’ll blame this mess on the digital gremlins.This installment should come after Bridget’s chapter ending in “I wouldn’t be in this mess if it hadn’t been for you.”
He said nothing when he noticed his mother feel the pockets of his raincaot hanging on the back of the study door. She must have felt his eyes on her because she turned to confront him. ‘Do you know how much I’ve had to eat in the last three days? Do you?’ She took a step forward. ‘I wonder if you even care. And really it’s all your fault. I wouldn’t be in this mess if it hadn’t been for you.’
He shook his head, opened the front door and stood beside it like a soldier on sentry duty.
A life time of bitter experience had taught him sidestepping like a pro quarterback was his best defense in times such as this. With 100 000 big ones at stake plus the mysterious unnamed ‘bonus’, he was no sooner about to tamper with the game plan than he was to tap dance down the street naked in the rain singing an off-key rendition of Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire’.
As his mother threatened further rumblings inside, he bolstered himself by recalling scenes from one of his favorite movies, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. That film had featured a character named Chief, who for most of the movie had fooled everyone into believing he was mute. Robert drew the inspiration he needed from these celluloid inspired thoughts and, after staring for an overly long time at the sole letter sticking out of his front lawn letter box but deciding he would retrieve it later, sucked in a deep breath, turned on his heel and returned inside where the fire-breathing Grumpasaurus Rex lay waiting.
As he breached the doorway the sound of the living room telephone ringing drifted down the hall. Thoughts flashed through his mind. He knew if he decided to answer it he could not speak. He also well understood if he delayed much longer his enraged mother would answer it for him, being the clinically efficient, ‘Nurse Ratchet’ type of person she had forever been.
Robert strode across the hallway tiles like a dutiful waiter in a five star restaurant, wiping a bead of sweat from just above his right eyebrow as he did so. He reached the phone on what he counted was it’s 7th, perhaps 8th ring, carefully lifted the handset and silently placed the phone to his ear with his mother all the while watching him with monitoring eyes like a fighter jet’s radar.
He listened and put the phone down. Although there was a human on the other end, it was a call that didn’t require a word from him. Not really.
It was Viper Squad and another of their ‘System One’ randomly timed phone checks.These were made to confirm he was maintaining the code of silence in accordance with the rules of the contest. As one would expect with so much at stake, this ‘Above Top Secret’ league of exorbitantly wealthy but equally perverse individuals who enjoyed offering impossible challenges to ordinary people and then watching them wriggle and contort with unimaginable effort only to end up inevitably failing,had a variety of methods of ensuring that their absurd contest rules were being followed.
Robert knew from the beginning that his home had been bugged. To date he’d located precisely nine separate listening devices hidden in various locations around his house. He’d used his FM radio, carrying it from room to room and using a feedback technique he’d read about in an electronics magazine, to find them. He figured they’d been secreted the day he’d signed the paperwork for the contest at his kitchen table in front of the two black-suited mooks with the fitted earpieces.
He allowed himself a moment of inner celebration, knowing he’d just passed another phone test – under difficult circumstances no less – and then regathered his concentration back to his present predicament which was keeping silent in front of his mother; an incensed mother no less who was currently spoiling for a fight and had the needlepoint collage word smarts to carry it on long into the night.
“If that’s not the strangest thing I’ve seen,” she said with a pinched expression and hardly even a pretense of good nature.”In my day a person announced their name when they answered a telephone. But I suppose your lot would call that old fashioned now”. She underlined this last remark with one of best soaked-in-contempt head-shakes and then moved across from the room to stand directly in front of him.
Robert could feel the adrenaline flooding his system now like it was being fed into him on an intravenous drip. The hammering in his chest he knew was not due to the impending verbal onslaught he recognized was on it’s way. God knows he’d stared down countless variations of those before from a mother he’d long suspected had the unmistakable blue rinse streak of a psychotic Norma Bates (nee Spool) running through the entire female bloodline on her side of the family.
His thoughts were for the money, as the more his mother spewed forth her attacking venom like some kind of out of control, flailing garden hose, the more he could feel the temptation to respond in kind rise up in the back of his throat. In years past he would have left the scene altogether, revved up his bike and been gone. But he was in his own house now and a tactical retreat to that degree didn’t seem like something he could do anymore like he had when he was a teenager living under his mother’s roof.
“Aren’t you in the least bit curious as to why I’ve come to see you today?” she prodded. And then in answer to her own question, “It’s not for the reason you might think, so I guess I’d better just tell you. But why tell you when I can show you?” she said, while at the same moment thrusting a hand into the right over- sized pocket of her puffy sleeved carriage coat.
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