Weekly Composition Challenge

Challenge 8: Folk Lore

Each family has its own encyclopedia of anecdotes, legends, and "true tales." Parents use them to teach or warn, children use them to express a fantasy world, uncles and aunts use them to freak us out or crack us up at Christmas. For Challenge 8, share a family folk story. It could range from factual to I-didn't-know-that-was-a-lie-until-I-was-20, but it has to be family specific. It's more fun to peek in the windows that way.

Challenge 7: The Quirk Quotient

Think about your best friends. Your closest family members. The coworkers the office would seem empty without. Your dearest personalities, made up by constellations of -isms that nobody else may know or notice. What are the little quirks that make your favorite people, your favorites? Those things that might drive others crazy but that have endeared you if only because they are so specific, so quintessential, so predictably belonging to a person close to your heart? Describe all of the quirks of a single person, or single quirks in a whole mess of people. Let's see how closely you've been paying attention, and how crazy your little world really is.

Challenge 6: Origins

Let's say babies are blank slates. The slates come in different sizes and colors, but the writing is only after the wrapping comes off. Where do you come from, really? What shaped you? Whether it was nature or nurture, what got into your young bones and shaped them? Tell me about your hometown. Your first best friend. Tell me the fairytale that rocked your soul. What's your origin?

Peter at PeterDeWolf.com
"Is it because Barney has one on 'How I Met Your Mother'?"
"Can you use it to meet girls?
"Have you turned fruit?"
To which I reply:  "Yes."  "Yes."  "I had one first."  "I guess."  "Not that I'm aware of."
(Man, I hope that I answered those in the right order.)

Amanda at LittleWhiteLiar.Typepad.com
...I used to say I was born on the bayou. I liked the image that conjured up: some voodoo baby with twigs in her curly hair, sweat-shiny and wicked-charming, naked in the southern humidity...

Kelsi at ThisCouldTakeAwhile.Blogspot.com
...the comfort of the coffee, and the solitude of the walk, the grim beauty of the pacific ocean and the quaintness of the town all live in the core of me to express how it is that, at the base of it all, i really feel the world should be...

Meg at PuritanJamShort.Blogspot.com
...We were pretty poor, apparently, but I didn't learn that until I was much older. Sometimes, when I talk to people about our vegetable gardens in the side yard, our wee pumpkin patches, our weeklong living room forts and extended backyard camp outs, people look at me like I grew up in a different decade...

Chavie at hicsuntdracones.blogspot.com
...Only after talking at length with me does the lilt in my voice come out, reminiscent of early Woody Allen. It is hard to explain why it is I identify so strongly with a city I left behind in my adolescence - over a decade ago....

Adrian at FearofLanding.Blogspot.com
...The timing worked out and I was on the last flight out, with my mom, in a cardboard carrying box. This would be the beginning of my life of cramped, cost-effective traveling...

Jamelah at Jamelah.net
...One of my longest long-standing jokes is that I am the only Arab redneck you will ever meet. Being an Arab redneck means that I talk a lot and I don’t like wearing shoes. In case you were wondering...

Lesley at HowNowWit.Blogspot.com
...I am, therefore, not the product of any hometown. And I fear sometimes that the ugly secret behind being from everywhere is that where I’m actually from is…well, nowhere...

Liz at TheLFactor.Typepad.com
...I come from traditional parents. Republicans. Don't fight in front of the kids. Go out to dinner 3 nights a week because marriage comes before children. Because I said so, that's why...

Challenge 5: Turning Points

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could"
-Robert Frost

In preparation to work with children, we're taught to present no more than three choices. For children, too many options is crippling. The inventors of Neapolitan ice cream have the psychology here pinned. But really, let's not overestimate our adult selves. Choices can paralyze the best of us. Pressure is placed younger and younger to make decisions that matter; when I was a kid, the first real choice you had to make was where to go to college. Now kids choose specialized High Schools; they pick private Middle Schools. They narrow down extracurriculars to no-more-than-three, they have a voice in custodial hearings between parents, they talk about whether drugs are the best option for behavior management. At each turn, life courses are altered. We can spend whole existences consumed by What If, but we don't. This society doesn't leave space for looking back. So we become, slowly, aliens in our own bodies. Plans go wrong, sometimes delightfully. Our feet go astray, and years later we are unrecognizable even in the mirror. Do you ever wonder about the other incarnations of your What-If selves, locked away inside you, abandoned, underdeveloped, undiscovered?

Amanda at LittleWhiteLiar.Typepad.com
...There would be talk of Germany, Hawaii, places that would open up for us beyond the post and the army-issue furniture because my entire life with him was an open door covered in knobs. There would have been toasts by our closest friends, and everyone would finally be saying how beautiful we look together. We would have proven that it could work...

Adrian at FearOfLanding.Blogspot.com
...The school day had not even started and my mind was racing. What to do now? I was struggling with what my options were. I went thru my day like every other day. But, it was no longer like every other day. Every time I switched classes I sized up each teacher...

Ryan at RyanOfTheZeitgeist.Blogspot.com
...I have never before, or since, completely lost my shit, but I managed to extricate myself from the brute’s clutches, and from that point on I was a raving banshee lunatic; in my mind, I threatened them with every conceivable horror I could fathom, but what it must have sounded like coming from my drunken, screaming mouth I don’t know. It worked, however, as I must have looked like some rabid, frothy-mouthed maniac...

Challenge 4: Seven Wonders of My World

Anything could keep us from the standard wonders -- being born two many thousands of miles away; being born too many thousands of years too late. Many of us may never go past our own hemisphere, or leave a continent for the sea, or even get much further than our hometowns. But everyone collects Wonders across their lifetime, just the same. What are yours?

Amanda at LittleWhiteLiar.Typepad.com
...The Lake District is an impossible combination of rich red hills, mirror lakes, sheep roaming like lost clouds, and wraiths of fog to halo the highest points. An elysium...

Jamelah at Jamelah.net
...In the country, they dance in the soybean fields, low to the ground and on the plants and zipping up into the sky like the earth’s very own shooting stars and it’s astounding. Ethereal and joyous. Absolutely breathtaking...

Kelsi at ThisCouldTakeAwhile.Blogspot.com
...looking up into her old, soulful, wooden eyes, i realized that my trip wasn't actually interminable, that i would eventually get to go home - and that i was actually a little sad that lucy couldn't be more a part of my life. the idea of a house that's an elephant - it's like something out of a fairy tale. only, you know, in new jersey...

Composition Challenge 3: Random Act of Kindness

Amanda at LittleWhiteLiar.Typepad.com
One minute later she came stomping out to me, holding my tin-foiled bagel out like a lipstick-smeared shirt. "Do you have something going on with one of the deli guys!?" she demanded. My first thought was: fuck, did I voice that delivery guy fantasy out loud? But no.

Composition Challenge 2: Be a Voice from the Past

You know that argument where one person screams at the other, "You're so self-centered!" and the other person just sort of blankly stares? That's because we're all self-centered.  It's sort of the major downside of only inhabiting one body and getting one perspective at a time. We're each the center of our own universes. Before I meet or hear of another person, they do not exist. It follows that when a person moves away, or gets married to someone I hate, or takes up Satan worship or something, they sort of similarly disappear from my universe. My ability to move on from people is not a habit that I'm proud of. So this week I'm challenging myself to get back in touch with an old friend. I love when blasts from the past seek me out (granted it's not to say that I owe them money or that I might want to get a fresh STD test). So I have resolved to be that person. If you want to play along, do it! Break out the old address book. Or do some research and hunt someone down. Find out what they've been doing outside your solar system. Maybe they have a memory to share that you had forgotten. Or maybe their life has gone to shit and you can feel better about yourself for keeping it together. (Or offer to help them out.) My phone call is coming up tomorrow.

Amanda at LittleWhiteLiar.Typepad.com
...The last message he sent me said, "If I don't pay my rent, I'm going back to jail." My last one said, "Let me know how to wire you money." Radio silence since last Thanksgiving...

 

 

Composition Challenge 1: Parents' First Impression

Now that you have known your parents for decades, you probably have a stockpile of embarrassing anecdotes about them.  You can probably imitate them from the tiniest inflection to the the last screeching vowel of your own name, screamed in irritation.  But how much do you know about the circumstances under which your parents met - what they thought of each other initially?  Thinking about it, the moment of your parents' introduction is the most important human interaction of your life (you know, the one that actually started it).  How did they get from an awkward opening to shared parenthood?  Find out.  Write it down.

Amanda at LittleWhiteLiar.com
...The first thing that really drew my attention about your father was that he was white, single, and spoke English...

Jamelah at Jamelah.net
...My dad talked to my mom that night, I guess in between being a hit with the ladies or something, and my mom decided that he would be a fun summer fling because “he was a good dancer, and good-looking and I thought I’d have fun for the summer. I met him in the spring.” Seven years (and me!) later, my parents split up for the final time (I was 2). So it was a very long summer fling, then...

Meg at PuritanJamShort.Blogspot.com
..."Did you know his nickname was Moose?"
"Oh, how-not-at-all charming. No. You  mean like in Archie and Jughead? Midge's boyfriend? Weird."...

Kelsi at ThisCouldTakeAwhile.Blogspot.com
...the only hitch came when my mother offered an ultimatum - he could continue eating meat and lose her, or he could become a vegetarian and marry her. naturally, he gave up the meat. (man. the things men do for sex. seriously.)...

About the Composition Challenge

Ideally, this will become a collection of journal entries from various diarists. The aim is to keep people writing and updating their journals, which can sometimes be easier if topics are suggested from an outside source. It's surprising what you can find out when someone else asks you to.

Selfishly, I hope for this to become a showcase of my favorite web writers.  The challenges will be geared toward self-discovery, but the medium allows for us to discover others.  If you are reading this, I hope that you are a Composition Challenge participant.  Let's get a community going.

Simply, I will propose a topic each week, both on this site and its parent, Little White Liar.  If you feel up to the "Challenge," compose a journal entry and link it in the comments section.  At the end of each week, each participating post (and an excerpt) will be listed and linked.  Best case scenario, participants will write about something they might not otherwise, and find other awesome writers to enjoy.  This isn't a dictatorship.  If you have a suggestion for a Challenge topic, please e-mail it to me.