Writing prompt

Look through your memories and find one that was especially sad.   Think about all the details.  Make yourself sad. Now write it down in a narrative voice that is not yours.   Write it in poetry, personal prose or short story.  Add this twist to it: Look at it from a funny perspective.  Be smiling when you are done.

Your main character is asleep and though it is early, the sun is lightening the room enough to discern furnishings and objects about the place.  Have your main character begin his usual wake up routine.  When he gets up to sit on the side of the bed for the last residuals of sleep to pass, have him notice something in the room that is just not as it should be.  Maybe someone else’s shoes are next to the bureau or perhaps different jewelry is in the tray where cufflinks or earrings are normally left to be put away later or used again.  Maybe the bedding is not the same as it was the night before. Whatever it is that is different, have your character figure out why it is.

(To avoid the he/she, his/her, etc., inserts to avoid saying “they,” I put a male reference and for no other reason.  Replace it with a female reference if needed.)

Everybody has one of those items in their house that they don’t know the purpose of. I once had a slender silver cylinder measuring thingy (received from my husband’s family and sold by him at a garage sale) that was also a music box (say 8 inches tall, base included, and 2 inches in diameter).  That is, if you turn the little crank on the round silver bottom, it would play a tinny jingle.  It had marks engraved down the side I believe for measuring portions of a cup.  But if one were to put flour or sugar in it, the powder or grains would filter down into the music box box below through the margins where the silver cylinder and silver base met.  It was definitely silver, tarnished and all.  So the question is what was it used to measure?

Your prompt in all of this is find your strange item and give it a history and a purpose.  Or it you don’t have such a thing, give mine a history and a purpose. And share it with me. I would love to know the possibilities behind it.

This is more of a change in perspective than an actual topic prompt.  What I suggest you do is go sit someplace where you don’t usually go to write.  In my class, I have my students sit on the table or beneath it or face a corner.  How many teachers ask you to sit on their tables (none that I know of, unless you are in my classroom)?  Each of my students find something to write about because it is such an unexpected place to be.  But you could sit behind your couch, or underneath the porch swing or in a tree, behind the rose bush or under your bed. Sure some of you are saying, “Done that.”  So find your own out-of-the-norm place and see what comes to mind and out those fingers.  If you have trouble coming up with something, write about “going sideways.”

Imagine the sky a different color.  In fact, split it right down the middle.  To the left the loveliest color in your imaginative arsenal and to the right the most frightening color.  Choose one of these questions to get you rolling along in your writing.  1.  Who would live under such a sky?  2.  What could make the sky look like this?  3.  These are the colors you were expecting to see.  What would seeing pale blue do to your psyche?

Frequently description starts wide then slowly narrows down.  In this prompt, start narrow, as tight into an object as you can; then move out, not just on the image but on the crux of the story as well. 

My example: The ridged metal round, a green stripe accenting it, was crimped tightly to the multi-flattened sides of the yellow painted wood length, the soft pink and black-stained eraser at one end a contrast to the sharp point of lead at the other.  The nearly new pencil lay in crystal sands, the rounded edge of a footprint holding it partially elevated and at an angle just so that it appeared to be an arrow pointing out the glimmering edge of a gold watch’s dialed face peaking up where the big toe of a dainty foot had pressed.  And Gina would remember that gesture of coincidence as the beginning, the glimmer of melting ice, in a very cold case.