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| My five images:
1) A sunset littered with cascading clouds, each accepting a different shade of red, orange, or even light blue in the way they tint the sky. It serves as the background for a skyline of silhouetted trees, all mostly bare.
2) A tornado of leaves blowing across the grass, which is still somehow green after the draught of autumn. The leaves offer a variety of colors from magenta to yellow to brown, some wrinkled and some fresh off the tree.
3) A seemingly endless line of birds in their southern migration, flocking to the trees in the thousands and then lifting off the branches all at once at the slightest hint of wind, of predator, or of any reason.
4) A thousand leaves blowing away as a tree, nearly dead, catches a gust of wind. It is as if the earth were spinning so fast that the leaves were being ripped off the tree by sheer resistance, yet it appears like a flame caught by a breeze, undying.
5) A fire pit at night, surrounded by old friends drinking beer, playing guitar, and reminiscing about the summer memories; the temperature has dropped to a cool, yet comfortable level, and the above sunset backdrops the gathering. The crickets chirp in all directions.
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| PROMPT #2: "What five images paint a perfect picture of a pleasant autumn day or night to you? Put those five images together in a piece of writing."
The rules:
One prompt will appear here every few days.
Keep the stories between 1-4 pages, or about 200-1000 words.
I'll post my story here.
If you want, comment on the story.
If you want, leave your own story in the comment.
Reality or fiction; it matters not. Choose for yourself. | | |
| I did a little brainstorming the other night and came up with this longer, drawn-out plot about a pair of shoes with the phrase "Whatever You Desire" written on the heel. Here are the first four pages of the story I chose to write.
-On the Heels of Desire-
'Run.'
Few commands in Danny’s mind were more articulate. He did what the firing synapses in his cluttered brain told him to do, put one foot in front of the other and took off down the sidewalk.
“Hey, wait up!” shouted his young friend, Jeremy, who followed close behind. Within an alley’s width of the two boys, three eager eighth graders were in hot pursuit, and while Jeremy constantly felt the pressure to glance back at the increasing threat, Danny saw no need. The command said nothing of looking over his shoulder or assessing the situation further.
'Run.'
Jeremy was thankful he and Danny had decided to join the junior high track team at the same time last year, and as such that he was able to keep up despite his friend’s alarming determination. 'Why couldn’t Danny use that to win a little more?' Jeremy thought to himself in about the space it took for Danny to turn the corner up ahead.
The bullies lagged behind as Jeremy followed Danny around the bend. He continued running full speed ahead, yet noticed a key, missing ingredient: his friend was gone. And as the thought occurred to him, a hand darted out from an open shop door, tightly grabbed hold of Jeremy’s coat, and pulled him inside.
The eighth graders had not yet turned the corner. As they finally came around the building, they stopped, momentarily surveyed their surroundings, and ran past the store. Above the door, a sign read: ANTIQUE ITEMS – Please Step In.
* * *
Danny and Jeremy removed their faces from the glass, leaving greasy imprints in their wake. Exchanging equally amused looks, they burst into laughter.
“Did you see the look on his face?” Jeremy exclaimed with unrelenting enthusiasm, not in the least worried about disturbing the antiquated surroundings. “I can’t believe you did it!”
“Well, that’s what you get for doubting—“ and Danny turned away, striking a superhero pose for a hidden camera that didn’t exist, “—Dan ‘The Man’ Devine.”
Jeremy chuckled under his breath.
“What?” Danny asked, playing offended. Jeremy just smiled. They again broke out into fits of giggles, then they began to peruse their new environment. Danny eyeballed a set of old comics in the corner. Jeremy spent time testing the rickety furniture for signs of which one might be the easiest to break, not that he actually intended to.
“Danny?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think she’s here?”
“Dude, I don’t think she exists,” Danny said, referring to the stories about the owner. “Witches don’t exist.”
“Still,” Jeremy said, suspiciously gazing around now that he had made himself aware of his own fears, “they said weird things happened here.”
“Weird things happen everywhere, man. Give it a rest,” Danny said, then instantly choked on his own breath upon looking down the hallway.
She stood about five-foot-nothing, with brown hair hanging to the floor and following a few inches behind her. Her dress looked homemade, littered with patches of various flowery fabrics, and she loosely wore an old corset. Her wrists were adorned with bracelets of all kinds, from simple wired pieces to gaudy, jeweled monstrosities that hid the skin underneath; around her neck hung similar varieties of necklaces. Her voice sounded like a poem, aged and graceful.
“What can I help you boys with?”
A pause. Jeremy gulped loudly.
Danny, of course, spoke first after catching his breath. “We were just… um… hiding. Looking—“ he corrected himself, “—just… um… looking.”
She smiled. “Looking for what, loves?”
'Loves? Who says that?' Jeremy thought to himself, but decided not to speak up. Danny, on the other hand, was becoming more comfortable by the second. The longer he looked at her, the more he thought, 'Wow…she’s not so bad.' His expression morphed from panic to peace in a mere minute of silence.
Jeremy wasn’t quite as quick on the draw.
“We were just looking at—at—“ as he began searching the room for something cheap to buy with his allowance to escape from there “—at—at these shoes!” Quickly, he picked up a rather plain pair of worn-out shoes on the counter next to him; did they seem to shrink as he placed his hands on them? He blinked and forgot the thought. It was worth the two dollars to get out as fast as possible.
'Why is he in such a rush?' thought Danny to himself. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, coming out of an odd daze, and looked over at his friend standing by the cash register. The young lady – 'Wow, is she beautiful' – had made her way over to the counter, still with that smile on her face.
Jeremy quietly slammed two dollars on the counter as Danny came over to meet him. “Thanks,” he said, a bit rushed, and with a jolt dragged Danny out the door. Danny waved goodbye to the lady, who returned the favor, smiling ever so widely.
* * *
Stay tuned. I may not finish this anytime soon, but I'll post the next prompt tonight. Enjoy! | | |
| The rules:
One prompt will appear here every few days.
Keep the stories between 1-4 pages, or about 200-1000 words.
I'll post my story here.
If you want, comment on the story.
If you want, leave your own story in the comment.
Reality or fiction; it matters not. Choose for yourself.
And, with that....
PROMPT #1: Write a story, real or fictional, involving a pair of shoes. | | |
| (I wrote this a little while ago as sort of a pledge to myself to start writing again. I'll explain the very general rules of the site later, but here we are. Enjoy!)
Writing now serves to occupy my time. There exists so little creativity in the thoughts or stories, merely in the choice of words on the page. Even that lends something to be desired.
Whenever I began my short stories, I always began with a character instead of a plot, a relationship instead of a situation to test one. I would then build from those characters and those relationships and create conflicts from within, narratives that were grounded in the attributes of each individual person. Was that correct? Should I even worry about how “correct” my creative methods are? Should I adapt them, change them, or attempt to construct new ones?
Maybe none of that matters.
The truth remains: I am still scared. I possess some inherent fear of how my work, in film or prose or song, will be received by the public or even by my closer friends. Publication or acceptance into a festival does little to bolster my confidence. I haven’t written a song in months; I gave up on The Ocean Isle nearly as fast as I had gained steam on it in the beginning. My unknowingly semi-autobiographical screenplay only disturbed me because it held so steadfast to the problems I had at the time.
I need to try. I need to start writing without reason or logic. I can’t limit myself to only things I have experienced because the fact of the matter is that I don’t have the range of experiences necessary. Or maybe I do, and it’s a mere question of doing what Lucas did and morphing those experiences into a greater, metaphorical whole.
Maybe I can set up a sort of regiment for myself. A work pattern, a way of forcing myself to work on honing my creative prowess. I can create a prompt for myself every day. For screenplays, for stories, whatever…just to write.
That’s what I’ll do. Two prompts per week, one for stories and one for short screenplays. Maybe I can find a book or a website that even supplies such things. Regardless, I have to find something to stimulate the creative juices in my brain. I’ll even schedule it just to make sure I do it. Every night from 7-8 pm, I’ll write. Every Sunday and Wednesday, I’ll pull a prompt from wherever or make one up myself and use that in my writings for the week.
Maybe I can do something else as well. Vocabulary. Learn ten words for each prompt and use them in my story somehow, just to challenge me. I know I can find a book with that somewhere.
It starts here. | | |
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