I haven’t done any new writing lately for a Friday Snippet so I thought I would share this writing game with you and encourage you to join in and share. I devised this game sat in a noisy hostel in Berlin with my friend Caroline, where we would read a random line from our book and try to continue the story.

The Rules:

• Go grab a book. Any book. It doesn’t even have to be fiction.
• Flip to a random page and pull out a line at random; it doesn’t even have to be a full sentence.
• Write it down and for 15 mins, continue the story!
• Feel free to post your writing in the comments section and feel free to comment on other people’s or share the game on your own blog.
• Remember to have fun with this, it’s not a serious piece of writing so just get the juices flowing!

Here’s mine:

The book I used was The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch.

‘Ahhhh-ha-ha-ha!’ he cried, finally holding out his hands…’ as the stick insect crawled with steady turns of its legs, its body shifting back and forth as it held to his fingers. The boy kept is at arm’s length as if the creature would leap onto his face and gouge out his eyes which were wide with both delight and fear .

‘It tickles!’ He cried, scrunching his face in disgust. A wide smile cracked my face as I scooped the insect off his palm. Thankfully none of the children had reacted badly to the insects this time. Last week a screaming child had knocked over the cage of cockroaches and stamped on two of them before a teacher pulled him away.

I glanced at my colleague as a young girl tentatively reached into the tarantula cage and stroked the fury back of the grey creature with her fingers, wincing all the while.

‘Here you go!’ I said, peeling away a green creepy crawly sticker that said ‘I stroked a stick insect’ and placed it upon the boy’s chest.

‘Thanks!’ He cried before moving onto the tarantula cage.

Two more boys came up to me pointing at the cage of insects, trying to distinguish, between the privet leaves, what were insects and what were sticks. It was the children’s reactions I loved to see: the joy of seeing, and touching something completely different, especially as the teachers watched warily from the side-lines and steered clear of all the plastic cages.

Thanks for reading and I’ll look forward to reading your snippets!