Welcome to Elephant Words!
Every Sunday we post an image, and for the next six days we take turns to write something inspired by that image. There’s an open invite for you to take the challenge yourself – let the image inspire you to write something, and post it either to your own website, or the forum here.
This page has been set up to showcase a typical week at Elephant Words. We hope you enjoy what you see, and decide to look around some more.
On 30/12/07, we posted this image:
Caught Out, originally uploaded by Nick Papaconstantinou.
This image inspired six very different pieces of writing. Excerpts of each follow, and you can read each post in full by clicking on its excerpt. Once you have, you can leave a comment on the post or in the forum, or navigate to the next or last piece using the calendar or the links at the top and bottom of each post.
“Personal Time” by Andrew Cheverton
Twenty four hours later and Cassandra Argento hits the streets hard, trading sole rubber for information and getting nowhere at the sort of speed that makes it hard to stay awake. She wants her mind back, and if she doesn’t catch a break soon then motherfuckers are going to start dying left and right, hard and fast.
“New Year” by Josh Hechinger
Stagger out into another cold morning without a coat. Or underwear. It’s probably on that guy’s floor somewhere. Under the bed. On his voyeur dog, who knows. Fuckit. There’s a dresser full of the things back in your apartment.
It’s gray and foggy, like you picture London being all the time when you’re listening to the darker side of pirated 90s Britpop.
“You’re Tearing Me Apart” by Douglas Noble
And we talked. At the foot of her bed we discussed the configuration of the scars that we had earned, and talked about the heat haze that covered the memories of our childhood summers. There were pauses and sharp bursts of silence, but the paragraphs were punctuated by gleeful bursts of laughter and of song.
“Mistaken Identity” by Xander Bennett
The blurriness started the second I stepped past the bouncer and into the pulsing gloom. It wasn’t, like, short-sightedness – I’m 20/20. It was more like bright white contrails, snaking around the edge of vision. Light bleed. I rubbed at my eyes, but the bright whiteness wouldn’t go away.
Took me all of about thirty seconds to spot Justin at the bar. He was the guy with the white suit and matching skanks. Two of them, apparently hanging on his every word. Typical.
“The Bright Side Of The Road” by Rol Hirst
Sarah Turner was the sort of girl who ought to have had hazard-warning lights fitted, and she knew it too. Whatever she got, she wasn’t ever happy with it. She only ever appreciated something when she saw it in her rear view mirror, but by then it was usually too late to go back. In case you haven’t guessed from the metaphors, Sarah was a driving instructor too.
“The Boulevard Of Broken Glass” by Nicolas Papaconstantinou
In some parts of town, the ground crunches underfoot – accumulated years of discarded glass, broken and ground down, coat the concrete pavements. The city gave up on maintaining these streets. Crossing the imaginary boundary from nTown to nHigh, Siân stepped onto one of these glittering pathways. Like a native, she took it in her stride.
You’re going to Northam High, you wear boots, you walk careful, and you try not to fall down. She thought.
Pretty good advice in general, she realised.
As you can see, a week at Elephant Words can feature any sort of writing, telling any sort of story, or even not telling a story at all!
Why not give it a try yourself? We’d love to see what you come up with!
Either tell us what you’ve been up to in the comments of the relevant image post, or post it up in the forum! Remember, it can be any sort of writing, in any style and genre… The only rule is that you have fun writing it!
If you like the site, why not subscribe to the RSS feed, or find us at Twitter?
