I was wrong: it actually was harmful.

 

I felt like passing out after the 'harmless' creative writing workshop, session number two, was done and I reached home.

 

This time, I was the first to arrive at the designated venue, which was confirmed last night.

 

Assisting the lecturer-in-charge, Suan, to organise the place a bit, I mentioned to her that I had an idea of a short story and it was brooding in my head for a week, and I had planned to get it down today in the workshop.

 

She stopped pushing the table that we were hauling into position, and told me to get working on it immediately!

 

Being the good girl I was, I booted up the laptop and sat down to work.

 

Bad idea.

 

 

I immediately was on a head-first collision course of brain-bending, and brain-blending.

 

When I had finished the first draft of the mentioned short story, which had perfectly 'smoothied' my brain, the rest of the workshop participants came, with some latecomers trailing in. Lina had arrived, and the talented Yi Xin, Peter (one of the boys in the group) and Pradhu, the one I mentioned who could write in a similar style to mine.

 

Suan had to play the ice-breaker as a memory game. She just HAD to squish my poor cerebrum.

 

It was a simple test of remembering the person's name, which was a moot point as everyone was wearing a name tag, and a fact about the person.

 

When it came to my turn, I had to name everyone around the ring. My memory did not fail me, until the last person. I was stumped for a nanosecond, but someone whispered 'sports', and I took it. I was saved from humiliation.

 

It continued on to an activity, to quote from Suan, 'to force you to write'. I know many people don't like to be 'forced' into writing. I was one of them.

 

To make up for this, I often have this lapse in time when a topic is given to me. In that lapse of time, an idea would spring into my head. I really mean 'spring'. It just comes in: a total plot, an idea that's plausible and fitted with relevance. I would immediately start writing it down.

 

That saved me today, I believe.

 

The next task was to dissect a large piece of paper into three columns, and write a topic - any topic - into them. I complied.

 

Games. Scenery. Anime.

 

The challenge: a limited timespan will be given to each column. Upon the end of that timespan, the instructor will immediately force you to deviate from the current topic to another topic, and this was a repeated pattern that could force you to return to your old topic, or to hop to a new one.

 

Everyone was confuddled, but I and my scrawling made the Anime column burst its boundaries and leak to the back of the crisp white paper. The Scenery column almost found itself in a similar position, but it was broken into two separate plots.

Games, however, had the shortest amount of attention, and a worthy amount of words on it, reaching half the length of the paper.

 

Majority of the rest had only a rather short snippet on their papers. The topic-switching didmuch hashfrazzle their powerbrain. (Save the MNOLG Treespeak!)

 

After that, we plunged straight into a writing activity. Deriving from the Lists (the moniker I've given to the mess of words the first workshop participants made), we chose characters, settings and scenarios to put into a short story.

 

I got a short story pretty quickly, and impressed Pradhu (who was seated to my right) with the amount of paper used to write that story - four letter-sized sides, two sheets of double-sided paper in other words.

 

It did help that my scrawling was predominant, and I tried to write italics by hand.

 

Never write italics by hand.

 

Suan only had to take a glimpse at it, and admitted defeat to my handwriting. I'm submitting that piece of work through email now, the audacious scrawls far from her sight.

 

If there was anything I gained from today's session, it was a brainache.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Lina asked me for my Hotmail address, so we exchanged contacts today. (No, you guys aren't so privileged to know that. Sorry.)

 

This evening, she came online, and there and then I told her of what I felt of her...how would I put this... precariously unstable situation.

 

I would term her as the 'less matured and more simple-minded' of the lot, but I did not tell her this.

 

So, I decided to do what a true friend would: offer her assistance.

 

She was elated, I'm pretty sure, but all she replied was 'yes'. In fact, anything in a form of an agreement from her was a 'yes' and nothing else.

 

Poor girl.

 

I already knew what kind of image I presented myself as, and how I looked like in her eyes: a writing visionary and nothing less. She must have been daunted into use simple words to avoid humiliation.

 

I started off by editing the errors that were already made in the MSN conversation so far.

 

Her explanation for her late arrival at the workshop was a mess. No sentence structure; it was hardly a sentence to start with, and the punctuation and use of words were all in a bad state.

 

I was glad I had done my epic critic quota today. I would have bitten some poor member's head off if I was doing his or her review while handling poor Lina.

 

Simple English problems and errors vex me. Grammar does not fall into here, for I'm guilty of blindly committing grammatical errors.

 

But to Lina, it was a big English woe, not a small problem.

 

So, for Lina's good and my mental state of health, I bit grit and edited most of her words.

 

Next, I asked her where exactly in the spectrum of English did she want me to assist her in.

 

Simple enough: we were in a creative writing workshop, and it demanded short stories from us. She wanted help in compositions (otherwise known as essays.)

 

Hard for me. She was, indirectly, asking me on how she could be me. (Or at least, if I'm reading things correctly.)

 

I write essays as a visceral action and output from my brain. I did learn here and there, but if you told me to write, I would write.

 

Putting the way I write into words and instructions was the equivalent of mental torture.

 

Still, I bit grit, and nearly touched my festering ulcer while doing so.

 

I looked at her errors and decided that Writing 101 would start with something rather simple: Sentences.

 

I warned her that it was a rather large topic she was demanding of me, and I would start from the absolute basics. She laughed it off.

 

"They (compositions) are made of sentences put together. Right?"

 

She replied with, for the first time, another word than 'yes': 'right'.

 

I jumped for joy.

 

"Compositions use sentences to tell the story. What makes each writer different is by what sentences she uses to tell the story."

 

That was the absolute truth of writing in words, I feel. Look at each epic and see that the way sentences are stringed and woven into a tale differ from each fanfiction author. It's also the secret that many authors don't know, and don't realise.

 

I was prompted: "Tell me more."

 

I was more than happy to.

 

"You can use sentences to talk about people and things in the story.

 

You can use sentences to talk about what the people are doing, or feeling, are seeing, et cetera."

 

She must have been nodding her head, taking the information in, or reveling in some Chinese pop music.

 

I didn't know, but I continued.

 

"If you're really good, you can use sentences to tell what the people are doing AND what they are feeling."

 

I bombarded her with the first example of many that were to come. Examples are the keys of teaching: to show mistakes, to show progress, and (to an extent) to keep the student engaged.

 

I didn't know if the student in this scenario was paying attention. I was wracking my brains for her, and I mighty well hope that she's taking this in with some effort on her attention span, even if I'm tolerant.

 

"The little girl hugged her elder sister.

She cried into her skirt. She felt so scared."

"The little girl hugged her elder sister,crying into her skirt, feeling very scared."

"The little girl, trembling in spasms, wrapped herself around her elder sister's legs, crying into her sister's plaid skirt, too afraid to look at the monster before them."

 

The last one was to cool off my overworked engine.

 

Now, if the student was paying attention...

 

"Can you see the difference?"

 

"Yes"

 

Yes, she was paying attention. No, she did not know that I was non-plussed about her constant use of 'yes' as a confirmation.

 

"thanks ur my best teacher!"

 

 

That was heartwarming.

 

"Okay, now the best teacher becomes the scary teacher."

 

Time to rattle her a bit, and kick her mind into gear.

 

"Eh, can you tell me the difference between the examples? For example, how many sentences were used in each example?"

 

Clearly, the answer was three, then one, then one.

 

"3 examples" was the reply.

 

She did not get me, did she?

 

I repeated my question, and provided the example once more for easy reference.

 

"one"

 

 

If you thought I collapsed into hysteria, I did not.

 

I asked her the question one more time, and this time, I added:

 

(A sentence is like this.)

 

"3"

 

It was followed by cries of jubilation from yours truly.

 

 

Finally, she was getting it! After her lifetime of an incomprehensible basis of written English, she now grasped an important part, one of the most important parts, of an English essay!

 

What an achievement!

 

 

I was about to pat her on the back when she thanked me for the lessons and called it a day.

 

 

Never mind. It would wait till the next lesson.