by Matt Herron
Write about something useless and beautiful.
She was a mess. You know the type: always late to class and when she finally showed up she was disorganized, she forgot to bring a pen or left the book in her locker. Her apartment was a minefield with barely space to step and always in desperate need of a good cleaning. Most days it was a miracle if the floor was even visible. But none of it ever bothered her. She would smile apologetically in class and ask me to borrow a pen, which I always proffered and she rarely returned. Or she would tell you, when you shook your head at her disaster of an apartment, that this was clean and you should see it when it gets dirty. She carried the mess around with her too. Her outfits were thrown together at the last minute, though she took an hour to get dressed, and although they seemed to match in a mismatched sort of way, she was never what you would call neat. She couldn’t do her nails or the paint would wear off in odd places, or she would pick it off starting with the little finger, and that’s if she had the patience to wait for the paint to dry. And don’t get me started on her hair. Even on special occasions, like college homecoming when we all got dressed up and met in the big room in Rogers Hall after dinner to dance and drink and talk, though she had put on a slim-fitting, open-backed black dress, and she was wearing heels that made walking precarious, to say the least, the bobby pins fell out of her hair an hour in and it fell in loose blonde ringlets to her shoulders. So like her, that hair. That’s what I remember most. The big blonde curls that covered got in her eyes in class or spread out under her head like a cloud when she lay down. That hair was beyond taming, beyond any form of order. It sprawled where it would, it did what was natural with no effort to tame it. Useless, she would call it, and threaten to shave her head, buddha-bald. But she never did. She loved her hair, as useless and unmanageable as it was, and I loved her.
by Matt Herron
Write about somebody else’s mortification.
We played travel soccer games on Sundays, which turned out to be a lucky break for the refs. —Read on »
The Kansas City Star stylebook that Ernest Hemingway once credited with containing “the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing” can be found online, in plain text, here. The deteriorated facsimile is here.
by Matt Herron
Write about a friendship that you failed. (short story. fiction. 1,060 words.)
Bernie
We’ve all managed to let someone down, whether by accident or on purpose. There is one old friend I remember in particular. We met on my first day in college, after my Mother and I had lugged all my crap from the parking lot, across the west quad, and into my new room on the third floor of Edwards Hall. We said our goodbyes back at the car. She cried. Then she stopped crying and I watched her drive away. —Read on »
by Matt Herron
Remember the first book that ever thrilled you? How it smelled, what it weighed in your hand, how you felt as you opened the cover? Recall that exquisite feeling – part fulfillment, part desire – and write about it.
I don’t remember exactly which book it was. It was probably one of the countless fantasy novels I devoured in my adolescence. But it could have been earlier, say, with one of the Dr. Seuss books I begged my parents to read to me, or which I read to them, repeatedly. Either way, each new book with which I fall in love reanimates that exquisite feeling and I recognize it because it starts in the gut. Not in the stomach, that is higher up and associated with hunger; the gut is lower, and the climbing vines that grow from there twine around the heart and on up into the throat until they are bursting to emerge in the fresh air. The seed is planted the moment I connect with the book. Maybe it is the image on the cover, or the title, which happens more often than not these days. It can also be the name of a familiar and beloved author with whom I have had good experiences, like Hemingway, or sometimes the description on the back cover or the hook on the first page into which I managed to sink my teeth. The dusty smell of a book amuses me but it is not connected to the feeling of being thrilled by a book. It is amusing because the smell of age is the opposite of the magic of discovery imparted by a good book, and it is astonishing to find such relevant wisdom in a volume many years older than yourself. Optimally a good book will fit into your hand and is small enough so that you can read in the most comfortable position possible, which if you’re not tired is lying on your back. Hardbacks are ungainly. I expect to find a new world between the pages of a book, or a unique invention by the author, or an insightful discovery – all of this is magic. I have been known to set aside a book halfway through because it failed to entertain me, delight me, educate me, or otherwise live up to my expectations.
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
Ernest Hemingway
