Various Miracles, Take Two
The year is young! And we’re back from our hiatus with one of our favorite creative exercise tools: the vast wondrousness of Wikipedia.
We tried sending this out before break, but something broke. If you’re receiving this for a second time, never fear—we’ve changed it up a bit to keep things fresh.
The premise of today’s exercise is simple.
Pick one of the Wikipedia pages listed below.
Choose a sentence—any sentence!—from that page as the first sentence of your short piece of flash non-fiction. Minor edits are acceptable.
Choose a link on the page—any link!—and pick your second sentence from that second page.
Continue in this fashion until you have a short piece of prose that delights you.
Start here:
We did this exercise a few weeks back, though with different starting points. Here’s what we came up with, beginning with the Wikipedia page for animal conspiracy theories.
The Bee-eater
In May 2012, a dead European bee-eater was found by villagers near the Turkish city of Gaziantep.
Bee-eaters are gregarious. Their typical call is a distinctive, mellow, liquid, and burry prreee or prruup.
Many bee-keepers believe that bee-eaters are the reason worker bees stay inside for much of the day.
Honey bees are not domesticated, and the beekeeper does not control the creatures.
Bees grew from the tears of the sun when they landed on the desert sand.
A bee carried a mantis across a river, left the mantis on a floating flower, planted a seed before it died. The seed grew to become the first human.
Following a death in the household, there are several ways in which bees are to be informed and, therefore, put into proper mourning.
Bees should also be invited to the funeral.