This short piece came from doing the Open University Creative Writing course (for free). I did this just under a year ago and I’m still happy with it – so onto the Blog it goes. Any tips for me? Let me know!
If you want to try the course for yourself, go to Start Writing Fiction @ the Open University I can personally recommend the course – which is a set of exercises and took me only a few days to complete while I was working. There isn’t anything ‘groundbreaking’ in the course, but it did help me focus on what I needed to know and there are loads of good resources to access.
Enjoy
Erratic
Like the roar of a Boeing 747’s turbines, the students burst into George’s lecture theatre and spilled along the isles. The suddenness of their appearance startled him – he pressed a hand to his chest to stop his heart cracking his ribs with the surprise. He hid his {shock} by taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes with his fist. Then he shuffled his lesson notes. And then he checked the thermostat.
George, Professor G. E. Vagun that is, was remarkable in so few ways except perhaps in how closely he resembled that particular stereotype of an absent-minded lecturer. Bespectacled with black-framed glasses; pencil thin frame enclosed in a lab coat; and with wild hair that looked a bit like a garden left to go wild, he was every bit every drawing of every professor from every comedy sketch on television. The more cruel of his students, he knew, had taken to calling him ‘Beaker’ after the Muppets character. He ignored the slur when he heard it in his classroom.
Years of experience meant that George knew instinctively when to begin, waiting till almost all of the students had settled down. He cleared his throat – a habit picked up from his worthless father. When people didn’t react, he cleared it again louder and then looked down at his notes.
“Today, ” he said, “We are going to be-“
Fran’s face seemed to stare back at him as he glanced up from his notes to see the sea of half-interested faces.
Fran. God, how he missed her voice, the sight of her – from her auburn hair to her chocolate eyes and her too-big (but still beautiful) mouth. He remembered he had once joked about her freckles being an amazing dot-to-dot problem. He remembered how his persistence and honesty had finally been rewarded when she accepted an invitation to dinner. Finally in Nice, France, she had said ‘Yes’.
“Professor?” The word was loaded with expectation.
George nodded absently, more to shake the image of her face from his mind. “Where was I?” he muttered to himself. There was a spurt of suppressed laughter from a small pocket of the students. George ignored it and continued.
Imagine Erratically 