Practice Series 1

The first practice series I recall creating was my color spectrum series. This was not a well thought out series, because it was based on me looking at a pile of my finished pieces and going, "Hey now, looky here. There are a lot that have to do with colors. I have a piece called Blue about a girl who wants to be smurfette, I have a piece called Red, about watching someone strut down the streets in a red dress, and I have that thing called Purple that I don't like, but it is a color, so..... How bout I write pieces with the names of colors."

This was so original. Man, I had to sit down and catch my breath from all the exersion of coming up with this idea.

I sat down at Vincent's with my notebook and decided on Green. I thought what could I do about the word green and I thought golf. I never played, but I had friends who caddied during school years and they would complain about it, so I wrote this quickly and it worked/ Read it out a lot at open mics and then got it published. Here it is http://www.everydayfiction.com/green-by-dave-macpherson/

Then I sat down to write another color and I don't recall if I wrote nothing or if it was so labored I realized that this practice series was never going to get off the ground.

But it allowed me to realize that a forced series can generate some interesting work. I also learned that it was valid to take the prompt of the series and go somewhere else. I took a color green and wrote about the location of a golf green. That sideways thinking was valid and fun.

The next series was better.