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You Wake Up Before School with a Tail, Waddya Do?
8 years ago
Ring, ring!
Minus the informal contraction, of course, this was an actual prompt my class was given in grade school. Let me tell you how I wasted it!
I'd stomped last year's official writing test, and along with a handful of other sufficiently bookish classmates, attained the legendary 4.0.
Now if I remember right, 4.0 implied perfection. The teacher looking over our papers had to check that both sides were full to the brim with words, legibly written with no. 2s, correctly spelled, and assembled into a comprehensible story with at least one simile. And God help us all if that teacher spied the deadly 'said'. While I made sure to obey these guidelines, I was still very surprised at my perfect score. My plot wasn't very good and I took several BIG liberties with the sciences. One especially, was entertaining the idea of an 8-year-old outrunning a polar bear. Don't ask.
Anyway, so now I have this new prompt on my desk and it's right up my alley.
'The next morning before school, you wake up to discover you have a tail. Describe what you would do next?'
Even by this point, I'd spent years contemplating transformation and animality. I'd already had dreams of becoming an animal, living as an animal, even dying--breathing my final breaths--as an animal. This prompt should have been a cinch! So guess what I do...
I get really, really giddy. I notice my fingers are twitching horribly and, what's more, they've reverted to the apish grip I'd thought the tutor had eradicated from my list of impulses. When the time runs out I hand in a half paper, a total play-by-play from a cartoon I had just watched the other day, only instead of a bratty sister with super-strength demanding her doll named Polly Poo Poo from her tall jaundice brother, it depicts a bratty fox with super-strength demanding his tail named...[gulp]...Tailey Wailee Woo.
Yes. I wrote that down.
Then he pulls my/his tail off ('like a shark' I wrote wizendly), offering no explanation to how the brush found its way onto me in the first place, and I black out. Then I wake up and, seeing no fox, chalk it up as 'just one of those things' before running to the bus that I'm conveniently still on time for.
And that's the story.
I'd stomped last year's official writing test, and along with a handful of other sufficiently bookish classmates, attained the legendary 4.0.
Now if I remember right, 4.0 implied perfection. The teacher looking over our papers had to check that both sides were full to the brim with words, legibly written with no. 2s, correctly spelled, and assembled into a comprehensible story with at least one simile. And God help us all if that teacher spied the deadly 'said'. While I made sure to obey these guidelines, I was still very surprised at my perfect score. My plot wasn't very good and I took several BIG liberties with the sciences. One especially, was entertaining the idea of an 8-year-old outrunning a polar bear. Don't ask.
Anyway, so now I have this new prompt on my desk and it's right up my alley.
'The next morning before school, you wake up to discover you have a tail. Describe what you would do next?'
Even by this point, I'd spent years contemplating transformation and animality. I'd already had dreams of becoming an animal, living as an animal, even dying--breathing my final breaths--as an animal. This prompt should have been a cinch! So guess what I do...
I get really, really giddy. I notice my fingers are twitching horribly and, what's more, they've reverted to the apish grip I'd thought the tutor had eradicated from my list of impulses. When the time runs out I hand in a half paper, a total play-by-play from a cartoon I had just watched the other day, only instead of a bratty sister with super-strength demanding her doll named Polly Poo Poo from her tall jaundice brother, it depicts a bratty fox with super-strength demanding his tail named...[gulp]...Tailey Wailee Woo.
Yes. I wrote that down.
Then he pulls my/his tail off ('like a shark' I wrote wizendly), offering no explanation to how the brush found its way onto me in the first place, and I black out. Then I wake up and, seeing no fox, chalk it up as 'just one of those things' before running to the bus that I'm conveniently still on time for.
And that's the story.
Also, holy crap you borked that hard, that sounds just terrible. I still wish I knew where my creative writing class short stories were, I literally skipped every writing prompt and hardly participated but the stories were so good I destroyed it...
Well, good compared to everyone else's crappy teenage poetry, no one else even bothered to write, you know, stories. So looking like a genius was kinda easy.
I know that feel about the 'looking like a genius' bit. In senior year of high school I did an eight page Social Awareness paper on 'Mass Media and American Politics', with only about half a page dedicated to The Internet(!!!). I didn't see fit to dedicate more, even when at that time, the signs were everywhere that a major transfer was underway. Still, I managed to get the highest grade in the class for my less than socially aware paper by default. Literally no one else turned anything in, not even a partial. Three weeks after the deadline the teacher was begging someone to turn something in, pointing at me, saying 'he did it'.
'Yeah, well, he's smaaaaaaart.' If you'd heard this remark in person, you would tell immediately that complimenting me was not the main intent.
I failed English because I kept correcting people during open reading. It was 11th grade, I had zero chill for these kids who still couldn't read by then.
As for your prompt, I'd go retry it, make it work on your own time if you feel it didn't come together in theirs.