[methods]

I'm sure there's that small word document you've got saved on your hard drive that you really want to try elaborate on but can't think of anything. Maybe you've got a few sentences scribbled down hurriedly into a notebook when an idea just struck you while you were getting off the train? Sometimes you'll get some momentum built up but slowly lose it after a few words in and tell yourself 'I'll get back to this later) but really you never do, and then you find yourself wondering 'what if someone else read this, maybe they could offer some advice?'

The goal with this topic is (if you're a smart fella you would have guessed this by the title) is to post those small proses for others to suggest, help you formulate and really elaborate your ideas so maybe you can turn that word file into something bigger.

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To get the ball rolling I'll post something I've posted on my Tumblr recently. I'd really like to turn this into some sort of short story but I've really go no idea where to go with it, if anyone could point me in the right direction that'd be great.

QUOTE

As I lay down and let the tide sweep over me I close my eyes and think about all the girls who have been in my life and the girls who I have wanted to be in my life. I realise that every girl I’ve ever wanted attention from has never given it to me and every girl I’ve never wanted attention from wouldn’t leave me alone. It’s an odd medium and maybe if the roles of the two groups were reversed I would still feel the same way. I stare into the sky and hope that this ocean will wash me away because I want to tell myself that I don’t belong here but really I just don’t want to be here. I want to be there with her but I guess things don’t work out like that and maybe somewhere out there there is someone who would want to be here with me. It’s a nice feeling knowing that someone else wants you but sometimes I think that idea is just unrealistic and you need to accept reality. I don’t want to be anywhere.

[Craig]

Good idea. I'll abuse this, I'm always writing scraps nowadays. They never fit with what I'm working on but I don't want them to go to waste either. I'm on my phone at the moment and have little saved on here so I'll share some when I get home from work.

[mark-2007]

Nice idea for a topic. I have a few things that would fit the topic, most of them saved on notebooks. I'd like to develop sme of them but, like you, don't rally know where to take them. I have the problem that nothing I write really has anywhere to go or any purpose behind it, so they just become short snippets. Here's one such thing:

QUOTE

The bus crawls through traffic, a cloud of exhaust fumes trailing in its wake. A pothole in the road jolts the gentleman sitting beside me into consciousness. He gazes around, hoping he hasn’t missed his stop, lifts the glasses from the bridge of his nose and rubs at his eyes. He settles back into his seat, eyes once again drooping and soon he is asleep again. The bus lurches to a stop outside a school, wiping the condensation from the window, I peer out at the children running about in the rain, jumping two feet at a time into puddles, splashing water over each other and laughing. Coats all done up to the top button, hoods drawn tight, outlining their faces and I think it must be difficult for them to see much but they don’t seem to mind. Their teacher looks disapprovingly yet powerlessly on from the shelter of the school entrance, her face occasionally turns to the heavens with a grimace as the rainclouds roll across the sky and continue with their downpour. The lights switch to green and the bus pulls away, leaving the children to their water fights and playground antics. The cold weather and the warmth of the crowded bus form a mist on windows. Students on their way home from a couple hours of studies sit beside the elderly, whose joints ache with the damp. In front of them, a mother leans over a pram, dangling a soft toy in front of her child’s laughing face. Later, the bus draws up to the curb in a back street of the city centre and I step off, muttering my thanks to the driver. A cold wind blows through Allen Street. From the Arctic Circle, likely to bring snow clouds with it, wrap up warm and be careful on the roads ladies and gentlemen. I draw my coat up around me, bury my chin deeper inside the collar and, hands dug in my pockets since I left my gloves at home, begin to make my way through the town centre.

As for your piece. I like it, though it's obviously short and a little unpolished. Not sure where you could go with it as, as I said, I'm not particularly good at developing my own stories let alone others. Maybe flashbacks t this girl he mentioned? Or to the girls whose attention he didn't want but got? It seems to lack context, so it's hard to really say much about it. Maybe more background about who this "her" is, and then move on to maybe meeting somebody new or meeting "her" again?

[Ziggy455]

Something I never got around to finishing, I have the plan for it so I know what direction it was to go. I just never came back to it.

QUOTE

Richard Dawkins sped along the horizon of the early morning Antarctica. His body covered in over three layers of thermal gear, goggles, and a parka jacket complete with snow boots. The snowmobile he drove slid across the Antarctic landscape with a continual motorized roar. Richard was to travel six miles away from Outpost 22 to research a particular area of low temperature which had been showing up on monitors for the last forty six hours. He cursed himself as the blistering minus eighty degrees stabbed through all the layers. He didn’t want to do this, this wasn’t his forte. Jones was the Survey Scientist. Dawkins was just the reserve. He hadn’t been out to survey land in a few weeks and he felt stiff enough as it was with the f*cking cold. All that seemed to fill his schedule was inventory check and security, as well as coitus with Angie Crows which seemed to be better than with his wife back in the warm United States. He’d been sleeping with Angie almost three nights a week, he’d show up to her room, drunk and horny, and immediately the two would be away! In those drunken moments he’d forget everything, his child, his wife. And he would just go with the momentum. Being stuck out in the blistering cold three months a year was a stressful prospect but it had its benefits. Privacy, isolation, and those were two things Dawkins enjoyed the most. The sun was expected to rise soon enough, that was something else Dawkins liked. It meant less cold, and that meant the job was going to be a whole lot easier. He turned the throttle harder, carefully focusing on the bleak white landscape for any obstacles. As he sped through the snow, his thoughts went back to his wife. He drifted off for a moment, thinking of the last time he’d truly shared a happy moment with her. With their child always screaming, with her constant nagging, this work felt more like a vacation! He turned a hard left and slide down a icy slope. The snowmobile roared and bounced up and down wildly. “Jesus Christ!” he yelled as he hid the flat straight again. “I hate ice!” he screamed through his scarf, the evident sound came out more like “I ay’ Iy’!”. He was close to the area, the ice gave it away. A rocky outcrop was up ahead which showed up on the satellite images. This was the place where the temperature was spouting. He slowed down quickly, when suddenly the snowmobile began to grind and skid on the surface. The snowmobile swerved and turned hard. Dawkins couldn’t control the steering; the surface was slick and dark blue beneath the vehicle. The entire place was frozen solid below! Dawkins slowed down the vehicle but as the humming engine began to quiet down the sound of cracking ice began to fill his ears. He scrambled quickly; looking down, the floor beneath him bean to splinter into blocks. He had no time to think, the rocky outcrop was up ahead! He jumped off the now dead snowmobile and sprinted forward, his goggles fogging up suddenly. He had to make it to the outcrop before the ice beneath him fell. The fog began to blind him, and then he felt the sensation of falling. He screamed through the scarf and lunged outwards, the floor beneath him had caved in! He continued to fall until his arms caught the remaining surface of ice. He yelped loudly as pain coated his torso. Something had pierced him and was still doing so! He screamed louder, this time it was ear shattering. He ripped off his goggles quickly and looked around, the heat of his breath quickly dissipating into the cold air. His arms were hanging onto the edge of the rocky outcrop which had a deep foundation into what could only be a frozen cavern. He looked down at the thick layers of ice that had splintered into sharp jagged blades. The large one was halfway in Dawkins torso. He gave a loud moan, he needed to get the thing out of him, and he needed to stop dangling halfway down a cavern. He slammed his hand down on the icicle, it snapped off with easy, but it was still jammed in his side. He yelped once more as the vibrations of the punch hit his core. He began to scramble upwards, his torso on fire, his adrenaline rushing. Crash! Something came down behind him, the sound of metallic carnage below gave away quite easily that the snowmobile had cascaded through the ice. No more chances! Get up! Climb the edge, ignore the wound! Get up! His mind raced but he found himself thinking clearly. He pulled himself upwards, trying to stop the injury from getting knocked or caught. He gripped a piece of the rock, then another until he had shifted over the edge and up onto the rocky outcrop. He lay on his back and breathed the cold air which soothed his burning lungs. He gasped, ripped off his scarf and let out moans in between each breath. Breathe in, fire in his lungs, breath out, fire in his side. He lay there in adrenaline fuelled relief for what felt like hours, the night sky scintillating at an oddly slow rate. This meant the cold was going to be sticking around for longer, that meant bad news. Dawkins sighed and slowly looked down. The rocky outcrop was actually the main pillar of the beautifully pure ice cave which –apart from the wreckage of the snowmobile- seemed to have small bright pockets of water that shone with glistening ripples upon the rocky outcrop. For a moment Dawkins found it a beautiful sight. He watched as the bright blue ripples cascaded the entire cave with an extravagant show of flickering blue lights. No more! He couldn’t sit around here and watch this. He had to look around for an outpost. He leaned upwards. “Argh, f*ck sake!” he screamed, the wound in his side stung and ached wildly. Biting his tongue he scrambled upwards to his feet, his eyes scanned the horizon. No lights, so sign of human life.

[methods]

QUOTE

He strikes a match and moves his right arm close to the cigar, in a few seconds a bright red cherry appears at the end of it before his face is engulfed by a cloud of smoke. ‘Whiskey?’ he asks me, sliding out a drawer in his desk and placing two small glasses on the table followed by a half empty bottle of liquor. ‘It’s only nine thirty in the morning, I don’t see why not,’ I respond. As he screws the lid off of the bottle and fills the glasses with the whiskey I take the time to admire my surroundings. There is a portrait of a lady hanging off of the wall directly opposite me, she looks like rather pretty. ‘Cute thing ain’t she?’ The man says, ‘Bought the painting off my Puerto Rican neighbour before the bastard got deported.’ The cigar hangs from the side of his mouth now; he has his glass of whiskey in one hand and is making hand gestures with the other. He pushes the other glass across the table towards me, I pick it up. We drink. ‘Now what can I do for you?’ He says, placing the glass on the table. The man is rather large; his suspenders make his stomach look like a large round hill with two roads on either side. He has short grey hair and his nose hairs extend past his nostrils. ‘I’m looking for something,’ I take a cigarette from my jacket pocket and light it. I’ve always wanted to do this. Come to a private detectives office. I imagined the wooden floors, the snarky secretary called Barb, the old tacky paintings hanging off the walls. A certificate with a name on with something like ‘certified private investigator’ probably ordered off some website found from search engine results. An old washed up detective with a drinking problem who failed the police exam one too many times. I lean my back in my chair and take a small drag from the cigarette, ‘

Heres something else I was working on. Feel free to post your free-writes regardless of if you want criticism or not (should have made that a bit more clearer).

@Mark: That's a really nice piece, a lot of imagery there man.
@Ziggy: I can definitely see that becoming a bigger story, the setting reminds me of Ice Station by Matthew Reilly but your style is different to his.

[Vercetti21]

Good idea for a thread. I wrote this one when I was angry and felt like creating a character, though it never went anywhere.

QUOTE

Gerry was the kind of guy who always sided with authority to gain the upper hand. He loathed the people he slyly condescended, which was generally everyone except for himself. This guy gained this hyper-sarcasm serving as a f*cking hall monitor in high school, often implementing his mind and mouth as weapons against bullies due to his inability to portray himself as any real physical threat. He was lanky and tall and walked like a skeleton puppet with a pissed-off look tattooed to his face. He made jokes out of anything and anybody, and crossed lines and stepped on toes just for the sake of initiating a debate. Now let’s get one thing straight here. The goal of a debate - a real debate - should be to seek truth. Gerry’s debates only sought to reinforce his own god complex, and the odds were often stacked against you before you even spoke a word. This problem carried with Gerry into college, and though he was clearly aware of it, he dismissed it not as a weakness, but as a superpower. He was dedicated to mind over matter, and he exercised his logical factories vigorously with late night chess games, Sudoku and crossword puzzles. In Gerry’s mind, he could never lose. So when he did occasionally meet the inevitable, his mood crashed for several days at a time. And at his weakest, this prick really knew how to rub you the wrong way. Everything was a code that needed to be tapped in to. Everyone was a mystery that needed to be solved. But once he got in – once Gerry really pried himself under your skin – he wasn’t afraid to walk around for a few miles in your shoes and exploit the loopholes of everything you ever believed in.

[Ziggy455]

Something I made after a few nights of playing Fallout 3 when it was released.

[TreyCrll]

"There's something about the city. I don't know if it's the bright vibrant lights of the bridges and towers or the bums on the street cascading from corner to corner like marionettes without strings. I see the people walk by, staring into my eyes as I stare into theirs and I wonder, do people have the same thoughts about me as i have of them or am I just f*cked in the head? I lie awake at night barely grasping reality, not being able to sleep due to my fickle ideas of what the world should be, or is it what i want it to be? I am the night's best friend. I walk outside often to let the darkness surround me, to embrace me, to accept me and my ideas for what they are without judging or pitying me. I am human. Tomorrow I'll see them. It may not be specific, but they will appear. A person, whether boy or girl, will project their conversation, but i will be the only person to hear it for what it is, much like the night. These people will impersonate god, insinuating that they know everything. But nobody knows everything. After all we're all human."

This is a monologue I wrote back for a theater arts class i took a whole minute ago, it's not the greatest, but I thought it was ok

[methods]

So this is my daily ritual. I listen to some angsty hardcore band singing about smashing the state and getting one over ‘The Man’ and find solitude in the fact that I am so young yet I am just like a cog in this locomotive, contributing to a system which I find so entirely f*cked eight hours a day five days a week. I’m afraid to push outside the boundaries and disturb the status quo.

I look at the middle-aged men wearing corporate attire who probably had the same thoughts as mine but now they’re stuck in un-filling jobs so they can pay off soul-crushing debts and set an example for their children who will probably feel the same resentment that we all feel to wasting away our precious time to pursue a lifestyle that is approved by society yet leaves people so empty at the end of their days.

I feel guilty having such thoughts towards how this all works because I know my father felt the same way, yet he accepted his fate and learnt how to play the game so could provide a better upbringing for me as opposed to the one where he had no say in what he was and who wanted to be. Sometimes I like to think that I have the same work ethic as him but he never complanined about how lost and confused he was. Rather than be a cog which formed together with other cogs to keep this train functioning he said ‘f*ck that’ and decided to become the conductor of a whole bunch of trains. I envy him for pushing through the unknown and coming out on top while still keeping his sanity.