An Exercise in Creative Writing At the start of Skin the film’s title is revealed in letters cut out of a black background. The letters advance towards the viewer growing larger and larger and the opening scene of the film – a 1994 election-day celebration - is revealed through them in high angle.  It is an early alert to the fundamental role skin and skin colour will play in the story.  It is as if everything will occur as though a filter of skin, or within a frame defined by skin. 

Enrich your description by finding out more about your skin – it is pretty miraculous stuff. 

What's the body's biggest organ? You might be surprised to find out it's the skin. Your skin is very important because: it covers and protects everything inside your body helps keep our bodies at just the right temperature allows us to have the sense of touch Look down at your hands for a minute. Even though you can't see anything happening, your epidermis is hard at work. At the bottom of the epidermis, new skin cells are forming.When the cells are ready, they start moving toward the top of your epidermis. This trip takes about 2 weeks to a month. As newer cells continue to move up, older cells near the top die and rise to the surface of your skin. What you see on your hands (and everywhere else on your body) are really dead skin cells.

Melanin Melanin gives skin its color. The darker your skin is, the more melanin you have. When you go out into the sun, these cells make exra melanin to protect you from getting burned by the sun. That's why your skin gets tanned if you spend a lot of time in the sun.

Skin Can Warm and Cool You Your body is pretty smart. It knows how to keep your temperature at 37°C to keep you and your cells healthy. Your skin can respond to messages sent out by your hypothalamus, the brain's inner thermometer. If you've been running around on a hot day, your blood vessels get the signal from the hypothalamus to release some of your body's heat. They do this by bringing warm blood closer to the surface of your skin. That's why you sometimes get a red face when you run around. To cool you down, sweat glands also swing into action by making lots of sweat to release body heat into the air. The hotter you are, the more sweat your glands make. Once the sweat hits the air, it evaporates off your skin, and you cool down. When you're cold, your blood vessels keep your body from losing heat by narrowing as much as possible and keeping the warm blood away from the skin's surface causing goose bumps.

Skin defines where we end and the world begins.

Black’ and ‘white’ and ‘brown’ don’t go near to describing our skin colour in all its variety. 

Study the range of hues that occur between knee and foot or knuckle to elbow. 

Every time I see tips on how to get rid of stretch marks, I recall reading Dr. Maya Angelou's experience. While traveling in Africa, she stayed with a tribe who bathed communally. While bathing, the tribeswomen began to weep and console her, but she could not understand why. It was because the women thought she was childless because she did not have any stretch marks. In African society, marks are a badge of honor. If a woman could not speak for herself or died far from her village, the marks on her skin would tell her story and she would receive proper burial rights.

An Exercise in Creative Writing This is an exercise in creative and biographical writing.  The task is to tell your life story ‘through’ your skin. What clues might it reveal about your interests and enthusiasms, your sporting activities or mishaps, for example, what scars if any does your skin carry and what stories do they remind you of?

Explore more ‘Skin Stories’ http://www.pbs.org/skinstories/stories/index.html