Creative Writing Hints

I was tooling around some blogs and noticed that a lot of people are going back to school. Here’s some first sentence hints to get them started writing winning stories.

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience. Perhaps like a guy who went blind because he used a pinhole box improperly to look at a solar eclipse. Now his sole objective in life is to visit every school to speak about the dangers of using pinhole boxes without reading the instructions first.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli and he was room-temperature beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as last night’s leftovers.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, something like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, similar to being on vacation in another city and discovering Jeopardy! comes on at 7 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like frying maggots in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a suburban neighbourhood with picket fences that resembled his ex-wife’s teeth.

16. John and Mary were like two hummingbirds who had never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, grandpa had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long that it had rusted shut.

19. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

20. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

21. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something similar.

22. The ballerina rose gracefully En Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

23. It was a family tradition, like chasing kids around with power tools.

24. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

25. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH conditioner.

26. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

27. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall