Exercise 1: Cat Names

Exercise 2 & 3: The Likeable and The Disagreeable Cat.

Exercise 1: Cat Names

Minxie - has fluffy paws like fluffy slippers.
Slink - a long, grey, skinny cat. Creeps around.
Graham and Leopold – a couple of camp, aristocratic cats who live in a manor.
Lady Shah – nothing will do but a Persian rug.
Henry C – a street cat, a bit of a gangster, lives in the Bronx sixty years ago.

Exercise 2 & 3: The Likeable and The Disagreeable Cat.

Henry C.

Henry C. wears a leather cap and talks in a raspy voice, always on the make, always tryin’ to hustle ya. Henry C. smokes too much, fat brown cigars. Bad skin, he hangs out with the wrong crowd. Henry C. is the wrong crowd. Don’t let him lead you down any alley.

Lady Shah.

Nothing will do but the Persian rug to jump up from onto the velvet chaise longue. She lies there like an old-screen seductress, long legs, curves, wearing just a coat of fur and a diamond choker. Holds a cigarette in a gold holder. Doesn’t smoke it. Let’s the smoke curl like a genie around her. Part of her mystique. Looks away, bored, above it all. Look at me.

Tutor's comments:

The great thing about the exercise concerning the cats is that they give such strong characters. Now those characters could lose their catness and become real life characters - the stuff of soap opera, melodrama, epics, the larger than life characters that may have initially been pictured as cats - but no one need know!