Prompts

Of course it's after midnight...

** A photo of a winding narrow street somewhere in Central Europe, sunset off camera, long shadows.

** Someone at the back of a bus is speaking. You can hear them heading for a favorite cliché to make their point and you cringe at the prediction. But you’ve been puzzling over something for hours and somehow your brain inserts the subject of your concern into the subject of the cliché, making the line seem like poetry.

** Late at night. You should be asleep in bed. You’re reading a favorite old book you’ve read a half dozen times. Suddenly bothered by what you perceive as the author’s missed opportunity regarding an observation, you must get out your notebook because you know you will not remember the thought an hour from now.

**The rain reminds you of a story line, a plot you toyed with years ago but never followed up on and forgot about. It was the way the rain swept sideways down the street that reveals the opening sentence you could never capture in the first place, long ago.

** Reading poetry again for the first time in a while seems to have magically opened up a wellspring of words you haven’t used yet.

** You are watching a movie and realize that an entire novel could be made out of one simple scene.

Simplicity. Ultimate simplicity. What have I read and who wrote it? There was something I read sometime ago. Didn’t I? A novel dedicated to one action. A walk through the woods. A train ride. A deathbed. One simple, central thing and one protagonist. A complication or two. A well-placed MacGuffin. You lose yourself in sounds. In feelings. In color. The way a piece of wood smells when it is just cut. You slow it down. Observe everything. Miss nothing. Take your time. Explore all the possibilities. But the challenge - how to keep it from boring people.

Now that I have four separate projects finished and out there making the slush pile rounds, including poetry for the first time in years (stop laughing), and I am caught with nothing to do, time on my hands, nothing to edit, nothing to fix, I am thinking of starting something. As usual, working without an outline or a fixed goal, it will come of itself, organically. Quietly wondering. How would one go about making a novel out of one simple premise, one act, without losing the reader by page 10 in redundancy and repetition, or the obvious. Especially avoiding the obvious.

I know I’ve read something like this somewhere before. It’s not like it’s a new idea, or something that’s never been done. It’s the challenge of the thing that appeals.

I only have a start.

In a year of sleepwalking, I have given all the religion back to their madmen. Surrendering that part of the brain responsible for prophecy, I find I am no longer guilty for sins in the garden committed by someone I never knew, done before I was ever born.

Where would that prompt end up, I wonder…

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