Scenes from the Cultural Revolution

Describe a scene from your daily life.

I drop the milk jar again. Glass shards explode over me like supernovae.

Use plain language.

I go back home with shame. The date trees on the road are tall.

Convey connected ideas...

The gentry are put on trial and executed. The doctors and professors are starved and jailed.

...using a similar form.

The day I make a mistake, the world will conspire against me too.

Think of yourself as a reporter.

In the square the children kick around a deflated ball, their shots as aimless as the Great Leap Forward.

Keep your readers in mind.

The district chief has gathered every household’s scrap iron. We will turn this into a cannonball and we will take back Taiwan!

Avoid repetition.

We will definitely liberate Taiwan!

Each time a character wishes, hopes, dreams, imagines, it robs the action.

Out of the corner of my eye I see my daughter waddling toward me with a pail of hot water.

Don’t use fancy adjectives…

I learn that yesterday the chief’s truck ran over my son.

… or adverbs.

Today I bring twenty dumplings to his grave for longevity.

Remember: overusing simile and metaphor weakens the prose.

The date trees sway like tombstones. My body is a nervous wreck of polluted flesh.

Clarity first.

I tell my neighbors I love my two kids. The truth is that the daughter is deaf and the son is dead.

Recall an anecdote.

The district chief turns out to be my old war comrade. As prisoners of war we put on shadow puppet performances for the revolutionaries. Those bought us our lives then. Now we frame certificates that we entertained them on our walls. These buy us our lives now.

Try to speak with authority.

The above realization changes nothing. The chief owes me a life.

Evoke an image.

At dawn I point to the waves that billow in the distance. I want to be the ocean that holds the rising sun in its palm.

Try to think of an emotion that represents your world.

Instead I wake up every morning from crystal ball dreams of living and dying.

Call for some sort of action.

Today the district chief has been arbitrarily branded a reactionary. He tells me his wife has already jumped into the ocean and tomorrow he will too. I warn him that he still owes me a life. 

This is your last chance to impress your reader.

Thus I command him to live. I take hold of the pen of dawn and draw in the trashcan sky with a child’s hand… “believe in the future.”