Stolen from Barb who stole it from someone named debg:
Write down one piece of your own work – it can be as short as a single sentence or as long as a paragraph – that you particularly love, and that you would point to if asked for an example of your voice. Fiction, fic, poetry, drama, song lyrics, anything at all, published or unpublished.
For readers:
Write down the first sentence, passage, bit of dialogue, whatever, that has stuck in your mind from something you yourself didn’t write.
The writing one was a lot harder than I thought. Apparently I’m crazy for my own prose. I decided to pick my favorite line from my newest work-in-progress:
“We run the country, even the states you wouldn’t think we’d care about, like Nebraska.”
The reading one was easy. Despite the endless snippets of books, essays and plays I’ve been forced to memorize throughout the year, there’s only one I like quoting so much, and that’s from Douglas Adam’s Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s all about evolution, humor, and the ridiculousness of logic:
“I cannot prove that I exist,” says God, “becuase proof denies faith, and without faith, I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. Q.E.D.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
