10-Minute Writing Exercise #4

I hope these exercises are encouraging you to think more like a writer and expanding your comfort zone. Personally, they are greatly enhancing my skills. I am producing work that I wouldn't have thought of before and gaining confidence in areas where I usually face challenges.

If you're not a writer, I hope you find these posts engaging and enjoy the story snippets they produce. I aim to make this less like a lesson to appeal to a broader audience. If you have suggestions or feedback, please feel free to share them. I will take all constructive opinions into account.

The format for this exercise remains the same: a random noun is generated and a 10-minute timer is set. My remaining time after completion is shown here along with the word I was given. As you can see, I ran over by a few seconds again this time. There were a couple of extra sentences that I felt needed to be added before I could be happy with it. However, as I've said in previous posts, the time limit isn't really the most important aspect, it's purely a constraint to encourage your mind to think quickly.

This time the word given was Ivory and this is what resulted.

Sarah looked out from her tent window at the new sun rising over the scrubland. The dew from the morning evaporated from the leaves in the rapidly increasing heat. She sighed, This is exactly where she needed to be.

Initially, she had only volunteered for a position when she had left the Marines; something that would give her a sense of purpose like that did. Something that would make her feel like she was making a difference. What better cause than helping to preserve an entire species from going extinct.

It was about 3 months into her volunteer work that her talents were realized, and she was soon offered a full-time position on the Okavango Anti-Poaching Team. Her time serving had given her a skill set that was ideally suited to this kind of work. Her basic tracking skills gave her an edge and with the help of the local trackers, she was able to fine-tune this to a highly evolved art. She was also able to think like the poachers, another merit of the Marine’s anti-warfare exercises. She knew where the herd was going to be, and she knew when and how the poachers would strike. Others in her team thought she might have been clairvoyant; always one step ahead, She knew though, that it was all training and perfecting her skills.

The heard she was assigned to had around 12 members including one large bull with enormous and pristine tusks; This is who the poachers would be targeting, thus, he was who she would be spending much of her time watching, keeping her distance and observing the behaviour patterns. They would soon make their move, and she would spring her carefully laid trap in response.

They aren’t getting this magnificent creature she thought, a smirk forming in the corner of her mouth as she imagined the outcome.

This snippet lacks detailed content that I would have liked to include if I had more time, to better convey the environment and the characters. I designed it more as a contextual overview rather than a full scene: a very brief insight into the character's identity and her objectives. I hope it made sense and provided enough for your imagination to fill in the gaps.