Episode 3 - No, Seriously, We Need To Talk About The Plot
Writing Exercise: Freewriting
Alice’s Writing:
It turns out that sitting down and trying to write for a set amount of time is really hard. She sat there looking at her keyboard knowing that she needed to write something. She had a deadline coming up and if she didn’t get this done today it was going to be to late. Sighing she turned towards her window and gazed out of it. The sun was bright and the birds were loud as ever.
She would much rather be walking around outside, preferably in under trees so that the dappled light would shine in ways that let her imagination actually flow. She remembered the stories that she would make up with her family when they went on walks. Stories of Faires and trolls that would hide behind trees and in pools of water. She longed to return to those days. When time passing didn’t matter and she could play in piles of leaves without a care for who saw her.
She turned back to her computer and sighed again. The essay she was supposed to write was tedious and boring. Something about some book she was supposed to have read for her English class that she may have decided to ignore in order to go out drinking with her friends. That night was fun, or at least what she could remember was fun, which was only some of it.
She stood, turned and left her room. Nothing was going to get written within the next hour, at least nothing she could actually use. Instead, she grabbed her pencils and paper and wandered out the door to the grass outside. Thinking it would be a better use of time she decided that she would try and draw the place she missed. The tall trees with spring green leaves. The forest floor covered in bluebells, with brilliant purples and blues that were shining in the light.
She set quietly and draw from memory a place that she had not been to in years. There was no point in going back to that forest for all the magic that had been there in her childhood had long since left. Her parents had moved abroad and barely spoke to her, and she was here. Procrastinating writing and essay that was worth half her grade. Not that she cared.
Her pencil moved across the paper with little thought behind it. Just sketching what her minds eye saw, thought often adding in little fae creatures that she never saw but always wished to as a child. She often drew as an escape from reality. As she could add whatever creature she wanted to.
Jade’s Writing:
The wall moved against the current in a way only a bedsheet could and the world was not only alone but unlocked. This is the worst I actually hate freewriting I always struggled with it during the exercises that we did at university but for some reason I suggested it today. Elephants are big and grey and quite cute all things considered. Outside my window, opposite the garden is a woodland. In the woodland there are lots of animals. Some of the animals are engaged in the dirtiest type of warfare, psychological. I see the squirrels laughing at me from the trees and honestly I am not afraid of what they are saying because I am a perfectly sane individual. However there is a weirdness to seeing them laughing at me which invokes such feelings of pity within my soul and I feel that as a human I should be above such things. Yet still the squirrels laugh at me. I don’t know if other animals join in, I have not seen anything on the faces of the crows recently but I feel, somehow, that the corvids are on my side. Perhaps I am mistaken but there is something about the face of a magpie that suggest to me a deep sympathy. Like the bird can sense that I am broken and if only it can find the right shiny material it could fix me. I probably should escribe birds with that much emotion but honestly I can do little else when I see them staring at me across the woodland. On the better days I may see a crow or magpie carry a squirrel off. They seem to only be worth hunting when there is little other food so on the days I am less proud to show myself to the squirrels I pull the birdfeeders and fat snacks in and laugh as the squirrels are carted off.
Previously, time has been a little unkind to the city. There’s old rocks and stone that make up the streets that isn’t amazing. The water wearing paths in the pavements like rivers in mud. Given enough time all things turn to dust and this city is not unique in that. She felt alone here, the collar of her jacket turned up against the wind as she followed the trails that other people left in the streets. Moving against a crowd is like trying to swim upriver and she knew if she relented for even a second the sea of people in their conglomeration as a never ending mass of limbs and eyes and teeth would carry her down river and deposit her somewhere she did not want to go.
The other people around her moved in the way that only people in a crowd like this can move. Their limbs locking together and their minds all following simple rules, the overall pattern was