Question 1

This question required me to write down whatever I could about a place I’d never visited. I then had to research the place properly and, then compare and contrast my assumed knowledge and the facts. There was nothing particularly creative about my assumptions and research concerning Havana, Cuba, so I’m not going to reproduce it.

Question 2

The task here was to spontaneously write three opening sentences or paragraphs to introduce each of the following. Well, looking back at that, I don’t think I did too well with the “spontaneous” thing. Quite a bit of thought went into each of the following three items.

Setting

The day was warm and dry, and the waves washed gently on to the shore. Large Norfolk Island pines shaded the table, its occupants, and the takeaway meal that had so recently been wrapped in butchers’ paper. Without warning, a kookaburra swooped between the couple, speared a piece of fish and flew off to perch in a tree overlooking the beach. In keeping with the day, it laughed. Its victims laughed too, and one of them took a picture of the bird, posting it to Snapchat.

Character

‘I was thirty-five,’ she said to me, ‘because I remember waking up on my thirty-sixth birthday and feeling so very alone.’ She looked down at her hands, entwined unmoving in her lap. She was no longer pretty, but grief had softened her features and when she eventually looked up, I saw resilience rather than hardness.

Event

The rollercoaster, locked into its loop, passed shatteringly over the weakening piece of track. The tiny section of mechanical fatigue that had started as an imperfection too small to be detected by quality control procedures grew. And grew again. And then, one morning, just after the cars had crashed over the flaw, it broke. Not that anyone saw it. Not then. But as the rollercoaster raced around the track yet again, accompanied by squeals of excitement, the section fell away. Amid shrieks of tortured metal and mechanical carnage, the squeals gave way to screams. Then, for a moment, there was silence.

Question 3

I had to conceive four different ideas for stories, and explain how they came to be.

Story idea 1 (Comedy)

Bartholomew (Barry) Sherman, a renegade submarine captain who became a pirate, and Harriet (Harry) Forster, the owner of an illegal arms warehouse near the Mediterranean coast, tire of their jobs. Near the start of the story, they trade places. Both overcome their underlings’ inevitable opposition and take such joy in their new roles that they start to reconfigure them. Harry starts attacking other pirates for their loot and rescuing whatever captives the other pirates have taken; Barry starts sabotaging his competitions’ shipments and funnelling stolen arms to oppressed people.

This started out as a dream I remembered.

Story idea 2 (Fantasy drama)

Tom Thumb finds himself in Lilliput and must reconcile the fact that despite being with people his own size, he is still persecuted … simply because he is an outsider.

This was another nocturnal notion, but not a dream.

Story idea 3 (Science fiction drama)

Set in the near future, everyone in Western culture has wearable technology. Network access is ubiquitous, as are cameras and access to them. This makes is possible (for instance) to see around corners using augmented reality. While the physical appearances of buildings and their internals are boring and colourless, everyone walks through an environment of their own selection. A young man is brought into this milieu from a remote village in India to study theology. The story explores his culture shock, the relationships in which he finds himself, how he deals with the conflict between what he regards as God’s will and his hosts’ lifestyle, and what compromises he makes to function in this environment.

My wife and I are currently sponsoring such a young man as he engages with Youth With a Mission’s Discipleship Training School.

Story idea 4 (Fantasy satire)

An elf with a flair for engineering starts bucking the system by dreaming up or discovering mundane solutions to problems that are traditionally solved magically. It would be designed to poke a bit of fun at people who have ‘sacred cows’ in how they deal with situations.

This started out with an ‘out of the ordinary situation’ (an imp disrupting luggage processing at an airport), and somehow took a left-hand turn into something quite pointy.