Another Belated Writing Prompt Wednesday: "Starting from Chekhov", a writing exercise.

 

So I completely forgot that Wednesday was Wednesday this week.  Just bear with me folks, I’ll get my brain back in order one of these days!  I meant to share this exercise a long time ago but then forgot about it, too, so now that I am remembering things again, I thought this would be as good a time as any to finally post it! 

The following is the result of a writing exercise done during the New Letters Writing Workshop at the University of Missouri- Kansas City.  We were to take the opening sentences of Chekhov’s 1892 “The Story of an Unknown Man” and then create our own story off of that.  It reminded me a great deal of the Story in a Bag challenge from the ConQuesT convention (although quite a bit more intimidating, honestly, given that it was Chekhov), which is probably why I was excited about it.

So here it is.  The bolded sentences are Chekhov’s, the rest mine.

***

For reasons of which now is not the time to speak in detail, I had to go to work as the servant of a certain Petersburg official by the name of Orlov.  He was about 35 years old and was called Georgiy Ivanych.  The first thing I noticed about this Orlov character were his striking blue eyes, which, when he smiled, sparkled as brilliantly as the summer sun on an ocean riffled by a soft breeze.  The second thing I noticed was that he liked to take off his shoes while he worked, and the resulting stench wafting from his office quite spoiled the sparkling effect of his eyes when he smiled.

But he paid well, and so we tolerated it.  Ruth took to opening the windows on nice days, which was lovely in and of itself, but on rainy or cold days we mostly just had to suffer through.

There came a day, however, on which Mr. Orlov did not smile, and his eyes did not sparkle, and he did not take off his shoes.  And this was the day Ruth and I found the letter.

***

I actually read this aloud to the fiction group afterwards (seriously need some more practice reading my own stuff to strangers, I almost had a heart attack….) and it was well received.  I had a good round of murmured “oooo”s at the description of the sparkling eyes and the ocean, lol, and another great round of “AHHH!”s at the end when the letter was mentioned.  Good introduction of intrigue at the beginning, they said.  Yay!  Well, that’s all I have for today.  Hope you enjoyed!  🙂