Creative draw

All the elements of the novel’s world

The places, the characters, the words, the creatures and the objects of the novel The Hammock and the Hummingbirds. Each one comes with a prompt to start creating.

The places

• The Blizzard: The Viking’s drak-car. — Write the thing you’re going through right now, without ever naming it.
• The Presqu'île du Sel: Where Coraline lives: sea, hammock, hummingbirds. — Describe the place you go when you can’t take any more. Without saying you can’t take any more.
• The Nord Ultima: The end of the road, in the far north. — Tell about the last time someone offered you something unbearable — and you said yes.
• Lower Valhalla: Warriors’ paradise, ground-floor edition. — Write a paradise on the ground floor.
• Nedervik: A city low of ceiling, high of ego. — Invent a place whose name says exactly what’s wrong with the people who live there.
• The magic lake: Home of Nøkk, the prankster horse of the rivers. — Give a voice to someone who lives underwater and thinks it’s just fine.
• The Île du Croco: Guarded by a crocodile lazier than fierce. — Describe someone so lazy they ended up becoming part of the scenery.
• The Dauntless Sea Walls: They hold back the sea. And the overflow. — Write what holds you back. Then write what overflows anyway.
• The desert of fire: The battlefield where the ashes are thirsty. — Describe an empty place just after everything has happened there.

The characters

• The Viking: Sverre af Haldorholm, self-proclaimed demigod. — Write someone who is always right. Let him talk for ten lines, without him noticing.
• Coraline: The narrator. Full of flaws, but very endearing. — Tell about a disaster that happened to you. Make it funny.
• Big Dog: Tall as a pony, gentle as a legend. — Write a scene from the point of view of an animal who understands nothing but loves everybody.
• The Axe: The Viking’s favourite threat, in person. — Invent a threat that never comes. Bring it back three times.
• It: The Ministerlet. Never speaks for herself, always in the name of the great collective WE. — Give a voice to someone who never says “I”, always “we”.
• Bjornulf: The father. Nicknamed “Narcissus the First, the Flawless”. — Write a compliment that is really an insult.
• La Linea: A simple little line can say what matters most. — Write your little inner voice. The one that grumbles.
• The locomotive and the anchor: Coraline’s parents. — Write a dialogue between two people who agree but shout anyway.
• Iznogoud: Wants to be Caliph instead of the Caliph. — Write someone who does a favour for the person he wants to replace.

The words

• Tchoufa: It collapsed like a soufflé. — Tell about the exact moment your ego came crashing down.
• Blablabbering: Talking loud, long and with conviction. Without a single rune coming out of it. — Write a three-hour monologue. In five lines.
• Skude: Lightning put-down. — Write the comeback you should have said. The one that arrived too late.
• The great reset: Letting go of everything to start again better. Switch off, switch on, be reborn. — Tell about the day everything switched off. Without pathos.
• Bum-numbingly awful: The ultimate degree of polite boredom. — Describe the most boring situation of your life. Make it funny.
• The Scorched Lands sickness: The sickness of the Singed-Toasted, which stays hidden inside when the singed-toasted one thinks they got away unscathed. — Write someone who is doing very well. Let the reader understand they aren’t.
• The schmilblick: The absurd thingy nobody knows how to name. — Invent a word for something that hasn’t got one. Give it its definition.
• Overstag!: The cry to change tack. “Ready about!” — Write a scene where everything changes direction in one second.
• The damage: The bill that lands when the Council of Elders has ruled. — Tell what something cost you. Put a figure on it, even an absurd one.
• Tchoutchourit: Puffy eyes when you wake up. — Invent three words for three states of the morning. Give them their definitions.

The objects

• The longship: To go far away. Or run away fast. — Write a way of leaving. Or of running away. You choose which.
• The XXL antenna: Twenty metres of scrap metal to talk to the whole world. — Invent a character who builds an outsized object for a harebrained reason.
• The hammock: Protected area, not an open-plan office. — Describe your refuge. Then explain why it locks you in too.
• The rear-view mirror: The murder weapon of their relationship. — Tell about a row that never really ended.
• Surströmming: Fermented herring. Tastes like a maritime apocalypse. — Describe something inedible as if you were crazy about it.
• The rock of truths: The big stone where you come to tell your truth, the only one, the real one, obviously. — Write three contradictory versions of the same event. All sincere.