Reminiscences of a Creative Writing Assignment

The assignment was open-ended except it had to be exactly five sentences. It was the first assignment of the creative writing class. I didn’t know it then, but I had so many choices; I could have gone with Faulknerian serpentine subordination, or with the endless lines of parallelism, or with a mélange of adjectival or adverbial or parenthetical clauses, or with the simple declarative of the newspapers. Or simply a snappy fragment. Or I could have gone with some imagistic haikuish things, like “A sentence, at its core, is an abstraction.”