It’s Friday: time for another {Creativity Corner} prompt. This week we’re writing about fruit — citrus fruit to be exact. Think oranges, lemons, limes. You know what I mean.

I love fresh apples in fall and berries in the spring and summer, but my favorite fruit fills the winter gap and grows on trees hundreds of miles from me. During the cooler months, I eat all the oranges, tangerines, clementines, and grapefruit I can stomach. I crave their tangy sweetness, the sour bite at the back of my tongue, their juicy segments that pop in my mouth. After lunch, for breakfast, right before bed, I eat them anytime and all the time.

Choose a citrus fruit and describe it in as much detail as you can. (If you don’t have a piece of the fruit at your disposal, use your imagination or find some pictures to spark your senses while you write.)

Pay attention to the light (or lack thereof), the color(s) of the skin, the scent, the shape (and irregularity of it). Once you’ve written about your whole fruit, slice it open on a plate and write about how it looks now. How is it different? The same? What does it taste like?

Try this exercise with as many types of citrus fruit as you like. Or compare and contrast two pieces of fruit. Use novel words. Practice your metaphors. Get flowery in your language and then be sparse. Take your time and dig into the essence of the citrus. Have fun with it.

When you’re finished, please feel free to share a paragraph or two of your writing in the comments or post the exercise on your own blog and leave a comment here with a link to your writing. Remember, these are exercises. The results don’t have to be perfect. But to benefit from them, you actually have to do the work. Now head to your corners and come out writing!

(Image by Muffet)