Scribbled down in a hurry, sometimes our attempts at creative writing can be… well, superficial. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A short story or poem can be simple, lighthearted and entertaining; it doesn’t need to be imbued with deeply significant psychological resonance to be worth reading.

But our new assignment title, Skin, was chosen because it offers the opportunity to get under the surface of our characters and perhaps create something more subtle and nuanced.

In a literal sense, the skin is the body’s protective layer, of course, but it’s more than that. It has become a social signifier to other people, revealing information about our age, our ethnic background, our state of health, and sometimes our relationship status, social groupings and personal tastes.

We decorate it with cosmetics and tattoos, lighten it with bleach or darken it with sunbed sessions, scent it with perfumes and smooth it with oils. Usually these are attempts to subvert the information our skin signals to others: to look younger or healthier or more aggressive, or just different from (or the same as) other people. Why might your character want to achieve this?

Even without these efforts, the outer appearance people present – or try to present – in public can be a metaphorical protective ‘skin,’ very different from the emotions hidden underneath.

Skin is also the organ for our sense of touch: the most important way we interact with and explore our world.

It’s how we express love, anger, sympathy and a myriad other feelings in a physical way, and how we experience pleasure and pain, heat and cold, freedom and confinement.

A character in the James Bond film The World is Not Enough is unable to feel physical sensations at all. In the film, he’s depicted as super-powerful, unable to feel tiredness or suffer injury – but what would life really be like for someone who cannot sense anything through their skin?

Our latest Island Writers creative writing assignment takes its inspiration from the famous science fiction novel by Robert A Heinlein:

Stranger in a Strange Land.

It seems perfectly fair to borrow his title, considering Heinlein borrowed it in the first place, from the Book of Moses in the Bible.

Heinlein’s theme, an alien experiencing Earth as an alien world, still has plenty of scope for creative writing, as does the Biblical idea of journeying for hundreds of miles to find a new home. However, your assignment doesn’t have to be science fiction, or religious writing, although it can be.

Your ‘stranger’ may be much closer to home: an ordinary person who has come to an unfamiliar setting or lifestyle, perhaps a city slicker lost in the wilderness, someone facing the trials of their first day at college, a club or a new job, or some other social milieu where everyone else seems to know the rules.

The important thing is to allow your writing to express the universal experience of being an outsider. Whether you’re creating a short story, poem, personal memoir or opinion piece, fill it with the emotions which will resonate with every reader. We’ve all been that stranger… but will yours find acceptance or rejection?

If you’re trying to remember all the assignments in case you’ve missed one (or perhaps more than one!) here is a list of the most recent ones:

• Sloth
• Spooky Writing for Halloween
• In the Basket
• Stars and Stripes
• Under the Microscope (not about Covid)
• Sparkling
• Emergency Situation
• Stranger in a Strange Land