I tried to write this yesterday afternoon. It didn’t work though. It’s not that I can’t force myself to write, but to actually write a story I need to have one to tell. The forcing part tends to bring out a story, but it takes time. The prompt itself is fine, and I tried to start something for a good hour. It just wouldn’t come. This morning as I was working out the next section of the novel before getting up and actually writing it this more or less came to me, so before writing in the book I wrote this. I’ll post an update post this afternoon. For now I’m in a writing mindset so I’m going to keep at it.
The Prompt
Write a story set in a place you have visited
Tips
Ideally this should be a place you have vivid memories of, so you can use little details to color the story — for example, in Jo’s post (above) there are all kinds of details that a French person make take for granted (the sweet peas growing wild in the verge; the red dust in Camargue), but that bring the setting alive for readers.
It doesn’t have to be anywhere exotic or ‘foreign’. It can be your favorite corner of your local park, as long as you remember to give us the local flavor: what is the light like? What can your character smell? What color/material are the nearby buildings?
Do remember to tell a story. Don’t just write a description of the place. What kind of person might be there and why? Do they want to be there? Why? What would you expect to be happening in this place/at this time? What if something completely different happened? Why? With what result?
Detention
The buzzing always bothered him the most. The quiet was bad, but the buzzing made it worse. It’s not like he asked to be there. It was just the way everything seemed to work out for him. Every time.
He sighed, staring blankly at the book in front of him.
Cough.
He turned his head reflexively toward the noise, even as he told himself not to.
“Eyes to the front!”
It took every ounce of willpower he had, but he kept himself from mumbling an expletive under his breath. Instead he picked up the pen on the desk and started to doodle on the notebook next to the book, but his heart wasn’t in it.
It smelled of chalk in this room. If he was going to be stuck in detention it was better than the band room with it’s stale smell of spit, or the science lab with the distant smell of formaldehyde from years of frog dissections. He’d been in all of them this year. His favorite was the wood shop room. The smell of freshly cut pine never left that room. It reminded him of trips to the cabin when he was younger, before they had to move. Unfortunately, the smell was the only good thing about this room.
Ah-Choo!
Squeak. Click, clack, click, clack.
Mr. Bowman was one of the worst teachers to be in detention with. He was bringing someone a box of tissue right now. Yeah, you couldn’t even get up to clean snot off your face. One time while in the back of the class he saw Jess lay her head down on the desk. It was hilarious to see her jump when Mr. Bowman pushed a stack of books off the side of his desk. That’s the kind of teacher he was, he would give himself extra work just to make a student’s life miserable.
Sitting in front was the worst. The idea of laying his head down was so appealing, but he knew better. Maybe in Ms. Keller’s detention, but not here. On the bright side the steel tube connecting the desktop to the chair back pressed into his arm painfully while he squirmed in the hard plastic seat. Why the school couldn’t spring for the desks where the top covered that tube was something he would never understand.
Still, it was the buzzing that would never let him sleep. The constant buzzing from above that got louder the more he tried to ignore it. It prevented him from reading, took away his desire to write, and thwarted his ability to do algebra.
