Coffee-break exercise: Side effects

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03 March 2023
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Explore a secondary effect in this week's creative writing exercise

'Side effects' typically refers to an unwanted or undesirable effect to a medication, ie weight gain, insomnia, nausea.

How might a side effect be expressed in writing, or worked into your writing?

Explore your ideas. Perhaps you'd like to write about the physical sensation of a side effect and the internal struggles of the person experiencing it as they balance the benefit of the medication with this less appealing aspect. Perhaps you'd like to create a passage of fiction where the side effects create a sequence of events in the narrative. You might want to write out the pros and cons of the side-effects, or examine the psychology of a person undergoing them, or use pharmaceutical vocabulary in a creative way. You might use 'side effects' as a metaphor for something else entirely.

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Whatever you decide, write for 20 minutes.

 

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