Writing Workshop
Writing Workshop Prompts: Second
Hello there. Part of the reason this blog exists is to encourage my own and others’ writing and in all my distraction getting stuck into my art degree last year I managed to forget that a little. I feel strangely guilty, like the blog’s lost its way a little, and that’s no good.
So, *best commitment face*, let’s get back to it. New writing prompts every other Monday, with a chance to share your work on the Monday in between. It turns out 2012 is going to be unexpectedly full of writing for me and I’m going to really need the practice – I figure I might as well take you along for the ride. And for any of you that started the new year pledging to do more creative writing, or for those that just enjoy the excuse, hopefully our fortnightly prompts will give you a focus and a reason to sit down and try something new. You don’t need to be a writer, or even consider yourself any good. It can be a couple of hundred words or a longer piece – the important thing is just to have a go.
For anyone unfamiliar with my Writing Workshop, you can have a read all about it and browse old workshops here, or if you’re an old hand at this you can started.
Prompt
I wrote about January at the weekend and how the first month of the year is often my wash-out month, my false start, so with us moving into a more optimistic second month I thought that could be our prompt this week – second.
Write about a second something, a second anything. Does it come with the disappointment of not being a first? Or is second somehow better, without the pressure and expectation that comes with a first something? Write about yourself, an experience, something in your life, or in your past, write descriptive prose or poetry, or, (and I’d really like to see some more fiction on here), dream up a story with ‘second’ as the theme. It’s absolutely up to you how you interpret it.
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Writing Workshop – The girl and the jam jars
She sat in front of two jam jars, one smelling faintly of pickled onions and the other so old she couldn’t even remember what had been in it. With looped lines she wrote two labels and stuck them on, one on each: Missing and Found. And then she sat with the pen in the end of her mouth and thought hard.
With a sigh, it was easy to write the first one, her hand moving to fetch a slip of paper she had cut, writing in careful, neat capital letters, folding the paper to drop it into the Missing jar. Best to get that one out the way, and no need to dwell, was there really. Those thoughts had been thought before. She could bury it under other things missing, to help forget about it for a while. And after all, she doubted that particular aspect of her life would be missing for that long. “You’re just in there temporarily, okay?” she said aloud, reaching for another slip of paper. Right, what else was missing? She prodded the word in her head, but found it unbudging. Words sometimes like to take on the character of resistant old toads, she had found, so she shrugged, fair enough, we’ll come back to that one then.
Read MoreWriting Workshop Prompts – Missing
I wrote a post on Sunday that seems to have touched a nerve a bit. And not just with single people, it seems, which just goes to show that a sense of missing something is something a lot of us have hanging over us sometimes.
So I thought maybe that’s what we could write about this week.
(For anyone unfamiliar with my Writing Workshop, have a read all about it and browse old workshops here, or if you’re an old hand at this you can started.)
Prompt
This week the theme is simply missing.
You can interpret this however you like. What is leaving a bit of a hole in your life at the moment? What do you feel is missing? How long have you been carrying this around and what do you think will fix it? Can it be fixed? Is it something emotional, physical, material? Can you even pin it down?
Don’t limit yourself to personal writing if you don’t want to – you could try creating an imaginary character to explore the theme, or write MISSING on a big sheet of paper, seeing what associations it brings, scribbling them down and then writing more on one of the things the word conjures up for you.
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Writing Workshop: Collected Glances
I am a natural collector, a hoarder of treasures. Not things that usually cost much, thankfully, but buttons and old keys and things I find on the pavement. I can’t walk past conkers without picking them up, or especially vibrant leaves, or pebbles or snail shells – my pockets are always full, the top of my piano always a shrine to my wanderings about. Mostly I love things that look like they have a story.
With my space to myself I’m becoming a braver collector. I dream of shelves of mis-matched tea cups, walls full of old frames with nothing in them, glass jars filled to the top with whatever I’ve thought to put in them. I want to fill my house with stories.
But if I could collect anything, if such things were possible, I would collect glances.
You know, those brief looks that people throw when they think no-one is looking. Each one a whole story in itself. And in a way, I do collect them. I watch for them and my little internal camera goes click. Some are slow and dawdling, others move so fast you would miss them to blink. You see them in the eyes of people gazing out their car windows in long queues of traffic, some vacant, lost somewhere else far away, fingers idly tapping on the steering wheels, others riddled with frowns and frustration with clenched grips at lateness and deadlines and don’t get so close, will you? You catch one in the sudden confused pause of a woman in the supermarket as she tries to remember what on earth she came in for. Another caught as a girl walks along the pavement with her arms folded around her thin chest, eyes to the floor, earphones plugged in when suddenly her eyes lift to the sky, in sudden response to the surge of a song or the line of a lyric as she flashes a smile, her whole face changing.
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