Ananda

I love reading and I love writing. At times, writing is hard. Writing about real things is harder, which is why I like to turn pieces of life into a story—it makes everything appear shiny and embellished. You can make the simplest walk to the shop an adventure by simply adding the way you walked and the thought going through your head. Now when I’m tragically bored or in need of some inspiration I do the following: Go to a word generator that gives you random words, get five random words. Then, in the space of five minutes write a short story, or whatever it is you feel like writing at the time, using these five words. My five words today are: forgotten, envelope, habit, brother, pink.

Five minutes on the clock, GO!

I don’t have a brother or, for that matter, a sister. It’s just my parents and me. People expect me to be selfish or spoiled because I’m an only child, but I don’t see why. I guess if we follow the stereotype, I would have been a brat of a child and had everything I ever wanted. I’m not going to lie and say my parents never gave me anything because they did, all the time, but not because I begged or moaned; I seem to have picked up this quite useful habit of having manners.

When I was seven, I wanted this baby doll with a face that moved. I thought it was the most beautiful and clever thing that I had ever seen; it wore pink overalls and came with a pretend adoption certificate placed loosely in a yellow envelope. I wanted this doll so badly for months and months, and every now and then I would ask my mum if I could buy her. She would always tell me to wait until Christmas to see if Santa planned on giving her to me. Of course, when Christmas finally arrived I had forgotten all about the doll in the pink overalls. That didn’t stop me from being the happiest child in the world when I unwrapped the large box and found her inside. I am now 17, it’s been 10 years since that Christmas, and the doll is probably sitting in the loft somewhere, broken and stained, but I will always remember that as the best present ever.

OK, I digress: I used up 10 and not five minutes. But you see the beauty of this exercise is that once you’re five minutes in, you often can’t stop and you end up writing something anyway. ♦