17 November, 2009

I Have Succombed to a Writing Prompt

(Cross-posted from A Slight Risk of Insanity, me writing blog.  If you want to become a Wise Reader yourself, you can send an email to dhunterauthor at yahoo dot com requesting to be added to that elite few.)

My dear heart sister NP has posted a writing prompt on her blog.  She actually has them up on a regular basis, and I typically read them over and shrug.  I'm not a writing-prompt sort of writer.  I think I got burnt out on them in school.  But now she's gone and posted this one, with a word I like very muchly, at a time when Aunty Flow's cut off the flow of fiction:

Choose a word from the list below and write for five minutes without stopping, beginning with that word as the subject of a sentence. If you get stuck, repeat the last word you wrote over and over until you can pick it up again.

geology
mobile
homeless
marker
pig

Happy scribbling!
I'll bet you, my dear Wise Readers, know exactly which word got my attention. And now I shall subject you to five minutes of non-stop writing about it.  I think it's meant to be a fiction prompt, but bugger that.

Ready?  Off we go:
Geology has taken over my life to such extremes that, watching a true crime show the other night, the first thing I noticed in a photograph wasn't the soon-to-be-murder victim, but the rock formation she was standing in front of.  Sheeted dike in weathered granite, perhaps?  Obviously a desert environment.  Interesting.  I wished the murderer (who was posing as a fashion photographer to lure his victims) had put it a bit more in focus so I could tell.  The cops wanted to know where this photograph had been taken, and hared off into the California desert to see if they could locate it.  "Ask a geologist!" I screamed at the teevee.

Geology's taken over my life.

My house is filling with rocks.  Pebbles from streams, rivers, lakes and oceans, deserts, mountains, and gravel roads.  My cat's even fallen prey to the geology bug and lies upon my sample card of minerals, which is on the couch.  When I get blocked, I turn to my rocks.  I turn them over and over in my hands and try to listen to their stories.

The first thing I notice about scenery now isn't the pretty plants or animals or views.  It's the geological formations.  Geology dictates things as varied as earthquake survival and the New York City skyline.  Geology, my friends, is important.
And I could go on about it for much more than five minutes, but that's all the prompt gave.

Just for shits and giggles, I'll tell you why "pig" was also a tempting prompt word today.  My stepmother forwarded me this:

Man driving down road. 
Woman driving up same road. 
They pass each other. 
The woman yells out the window, "PIG!"
Man yells out window, "BITCH!"

Man rounds next curve. 
Man crashes into a HUGE PIG in middle of road and dies.



Thought For the Day:
If men would just listen
 
My stepmother is a caution.  I'm lucky my dad's smart enough to hold on to her.  I sometimes think he works through the rocky moments in their marriage because he knows who'd get me in a divorce...

If anybody's bored and wants a challenge, they can try thinking up writing prompts that would tempt me.  Winners could find themselves showcased on NP's The Coffee-Stained Writer, even.  She hasn't taken away my keys to the kingdom just yet.  In fact, you can occasionally catch me over there in cheerleader outfits this NaNo season.

Here endeth the stream o' consciousness.  I need to take advantage of Aunty Flow to relieve some of the pressure on my poor DVR...

2 comments:

Nicole said...

Glad you found it helpful!

My prompts aren't necessarily fiction prompts; they're meant to get the flow of writing going, is all.

Karen said...

Aha, gotcha!

At the university where I'm getting my MS in geology, we have a steady history of undergrads with other majors who take a geology class to fill some science requirement and get hooked. I got hooked myself, only I was so disciplined that I kept going in engineering and did 20 years in industry before succumbing to the hook. (It helped that I was unemployed at the time, and my university was willing to accept me into the MS program with lots of geology "deficiencies".)

You know, one can be a writer AND a geologist...