Greetings, South County Writers! We hosted our first meeting in our new home at the Peace Dale Public Library yesterday. It was good to see both new faces and familiar ones, and we were all able to write and respond to three outstanding prompts, which I will list at the bottom of this post.
I’m taking a little of my inspiration for today’s post from one of our prompts on Thursday: “It’s so easy to be faithless…”
It’s not surprising that a prompt about faithlessness would inspire themes of religion, sin, confession, and morality. But one of our writers created a character whose version of faith(lessness) had nothing to do with religion. Instead, she created a character who is trapped by monotony. Her faith is in bad luck, a job she hates, and people who take advantage of her good nature. As a casual listener, I was intrigued. That’s the kind of character who makes me want to ask more questions. Why does this woman believe that her luck is so bad it will never change? What makes it impossible for her to make changes herself? Will someone else change her mind? Will unexpected circumstances jolt her from her routine? In only a few lines, I was hooked. I wanted to know more about this woman: what made her who she is? Will she change?
Responding to prompts is not about perfection. With a timer counting down 20 minutes (try it-truly, 20 minutes goes by faster than you’d think), part of the writing process is simply trying to get ideas on the page fast enough to build something that might be worthwhile later: a promising phrase, the seeds for an intriguing character, the premise for an opening scene, or a scrap of dialogue that makes you wonder about a larger story arc.
It may be antiquated, but so far, everyone in our group writes their prompt responses by hand. I think there’s something about the scratch of pen on paper that’s still deeply satisfying, especially when our group is sitting in the near silence of the library and pens on paper is our only soundtrack. I can’t deny that I have an occasional flash of frustration at not being able to type and erase my thoughts as quickly as I do in my daily life-writing an email, for example. But I also can’t help but feel that writing by hand creates a pathway to thinking differently-planning my words and creating more carefully than I might if I was working on a computer, as I am now.
Before I arrived to open the library and get ready for the group meeting, my day was filled with professional correspondence. In my ‘Sent’ email folder right now, I have 13,189 emails. I spent time composing, editing, and polishing each one of those emails. I’ve been proud of some of them, and could even argue that some of them were really, really important-either to me, or to the person who read them.
I can’t even begin to imagine how many words those 13, 189 emails contain. I can tell you, however, how many words I managed to squeeze into my first prompt response on Thursday night: 396. That was as many words as I could write in 20 minutes for a prompt I felt really good about. Is my response perfect? No way. There are words and phrases crossed out. I’m confident there are spelling errors in it. The writing itself isn’t outstanding-it’s a little “stream of consciousness” to hold up on its own-but there was a sentence in there that made me think about the kind of girl who could fall asleep in one decade and wake up still herself in another decade. And then in another, earlier decade. And then suddenly it’s 1921…
Writing is itself a kind of faith: we put words down on the page in an effort to connect, or to see what we’re thinking. We write to imagine something different, to dream a better outcome. We write. And write. And write. We write without knowing if what we’re writing will have purpose, or direction. One of the writers in our group asked how I keep from “writing myself into corners.” It was a great question, and the answer is that creatively, I write myself into corners all the time. If I’m interested in getting out of those corners, there’s really nothing better than prompt writing- sloppy, funny, amateur, imperfect and unplanned, raw-to restore my faith that there’s more to be said.
Happy snow day, South County Writers, and happy writing.
Prompts from the January 21st Meeting:
20 Minute Prompts:
If I woke up in a different decade…
It’s so easy to be faithless…
10 Minute Prompt:
He could sweet talk anyone…
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