Some weeks ago, my friend S and I decided to play a game: we’d pick a random word together to serve as a creative prompt every week, for 4 weeks. S would take a photograph and I would write something related to the word, independently of each other.
The idea was to not overthink or labour over the final product, and to just do it.
This was exactly what I needed, writing-wise. Before I played this game, I'd always thought that I needed a story “ready to go” before actually writing it. But now I know that I had it the other way around: some stories only happen after the first words are laid down. Often, I'd end up in a different place from where I started—characters can come alive and drive the story on their own, if I remain faithful to their “voice”. It's feels like control and surrender at the same time; a kind of co-piloting.
These bits of writing I’m sharing below aren’t meant to be complete stories, just imagined excerpts. Maybe one day I'll turn them into full stories. In any case, I hope this inspires you to prompt yourself (or your friend) into some creative fun!
Prompt #1: Heartily
She looked at his hands. White fingers with flushes of pink, squared off at the tips. They were wrapped around his fork and knife in the most correct way, index fingers extended to provide the pressure needed.
Lamb heart today.
“...and then she was totally embarrassed I'm sure. She knew that we knew.” He ended his story with a scornful laugh. It was the kind of laugh that said “Ha ha ha!” rather than laughed it. His Adam’s apple bobbed triumphantly and she touched her own throat reflexively.
He sliced into the brown meat with one clean swipe. “Right ventricle, maybe?” He said, dangling the meat between the both of them. He laughed a little bit again.
“Ha ha!” She dutifully laughed a little bit back. You’re a plastic surgeon. Not the real kind.
She hadn't laughed a proper laugh for five years. One of those hearty diaphragm ones that took a lot of breath. When she was in secondary school, they were all made to lie down on the smelly carpet in the music room and shout “Ha! Ha! Ha!” towards the ceiling. Hands on their stomachs, feeling the air expand their bodies. That’s how you sing, the teacher had said, while they giggled. This is how you engage your diaphragm. It was easy enough to do lying down, but the moment she got up, it became so much harder. Air just didn’t seem to want to move up her body like that. By the time anything came out of her mouth, it had lost half its power.
She put her hand flat on her belly now, and tried a little hum. “What's that?” he asked without interest.
Prompt #2: Fragmenting
They had wanted something fresh and modern. Chopin and Beethoven were over-programmed, they said. Something like Alban Berg? We should do something surprising this time.
And so here I am sitting down in front of the piano, about to play a surprising sonata to a hapless audience who will probably wish by the second minute that it was Chopin instead. It’s all the same to me though. In the last several years, I’ve stopped caring very much about the audience’s thoughts and feelings. I think that’s how I should have always done it, but when you are young you can bear a lot more of that kind of burden; hold the thoughts of one thousand people in your own head without anything cracking. Age hasn’t made me indifferent, just brittle.
I begin.
It’s a challenging piece and I am focused. It is going well so far, but now I have just hit a wrong note: the A, when it should have been the B. I feel a flash of horror, but it doesn’t throw me off; I recover immediately and I don’t think anybody has noticed. Frankly, the majority of the audience has no idea what any of this should sound like. Alban Berg’s music sounds like a bunch of keys being jangled in a box. Who knows whether it should have been the B instead of the A?
I am amused by this thought, and I’m not sure if the next wrong note—five bars later—is a result of my distraction or some sort of naughty prank my subconscious is playing.
And now a wrong note again, two bars down.
And another. And another.
I can’t recover anymore now and I don’t know why. My discipline has gone to hell and I am tumbling together with all the keys like a rag doll; I can’t stop playing or everybody will know something’s gone wrong so I keep going, my fingers putting their own notes together and creating rhythms and sounds that result in some kind of demented caricature of Alban Berg’s Piano Sonata Op. 1. My eyes slide across the piano’s lacquered surface and I feel the audience’s thoughts rising towards me like a thick creeping fog.
Prompt #3: Bed
At night
I hear my daughter barely blinking
sticky sounds.
Soft clicking fairy feet
in percussive pools of
viscous dew.
Some will never hear this;
I feel like this matters.
We don't get much
as it is, peering through
pinholes
at a universe of reasons
to stay alive.
In a voice too conscious
for nine years, she says
“I was sad on Saturday.”
I stroke her forehead because my mother did;
pushing worry between
skull and skin
till it squeezes out
like toothpaste.
At this magic hour of fairies
I am an animal crouched
beside her bed,
more afraid than she is.
I will never see her bones
but I am always aware of them.
Prompt #4: Leg
There’s just the matter of the additional leg, although obviously things are better nowadays and nobody really says anything about it, but it doesn't stop you from bracing yourself every time you meet someone new. Anyway, the way I see it, if you already have eight legs, having an additional ninth is not as dramatic a difference as some would make out. It’s also patently unfair that missing a leg is more socially acceptable than having an additional one. My cousin Steve lost a leg when he got caught by a cupboard door, and he gets nothing but warm sympathetic looks from the girls. And Dimitri, that fool who got three whole legs crushed by a finger, he gets treated like a war hero!
But me—I know the ladies think I’m a bit of a freak. There are days that I just want to leave it well alone and check out, what difference does one spider make to the survival of the species? Let alone a spider with an extra leg? I don’t have to put myself out there; I know this. But instincts die hard. And hope—hope is worse. I wake up everyday thinking, this is the day that I will finally break free of hope, but then it always comes surging back up again despite my best efforts, like it is doing now.
Because she’s here. She’s lovely too, a warm ochre, delicate legs paused at the edge of my web. Why do they always have to be so damn beautiful? I feel sick to my stomach with nerves, but I’ll ignore that for now if I can. After all, I have about twenty seconds to enjoy this feeling of possibility and so I will, goddamn it.
We look at each other across a field of vibrating threads which seems to be expanding with every undulation in the hot breeze. The weight of hope sits large between us, like a dead fat insect. I square my legs and wait.