May 13, 2022
Writing Exercise
Life on a Deserted Island The following writing activity has you writing the tale of life on a deserted island in a second-person voice.
You regain consciousness and find yourself lying down on something soft and warm; the sun is in your eyes, and you are soaking wet. You come to find that that storm you were in wasn’t a dream. You look around yourself and realize that you are on an isolated island…or so you believe. Maybe there is civilization somewhere? Your attempt to stand fails as your right leg has gone limp, so you must army-crawl to the treeline. You see that there are no coconut trees like Chuck Noland encountered in Castaway, and there is no source of water as your lips begin to parch. To your left, you see a bowl. A real bowl! A sign of human life, perhaps? You reach for the bowl; it is cream corn, the only food you hate. So you throw the can away in disgust, not putting any thought on how it got there. “Hey,” you hear, “we’ve got another one.” You have been found by two men, who grab you by your weary shoulders and guide you to their “village.” You are perplexed by what you see: men and women living in huts but wearing modern clothing. “I know you must be confused. You have many questions,” the tribal leader explains to you. “Each and every one of us was confused when we washed up on this island. One after another, nobody can seem to explain this phenomenon. I was the first one. Then, the next week, a woman washed up on shore, then a man, then another woman, then a child. We have built our civilization here. Since then, nobody has ever found us.”
—Conner Tuthill