Rands Writing Prompts #5 (February 19th, 2024)
Always more words
Write 250 words about an object directly in front of you.
Describe the next significant thing you are excited to achieve.
Describe your morning wake-up routine.
Welcome to Week #5 of Rands Writing Prompts. The prior week’s prompts are right here.
I’m sitting in the back of a business cabin on my United flight back from Hawaii. They just served dinner, and it was OK. For airplane food, OK is an A. I’m writing 100 words about an object in front of me, but I haven’t mentioned the object yet.
I was going to write about a writer’s voice, but this is Prompt #5, and that’s a Prompt #50 topic. Great, now I am nervous about the next fifty topics. See, the topics, the writing bit you’re reading right now, is the work, and if I’m going to do the secret thing I’m planning, the topics need to fit into a coherent whole cleanly. Problem is, I’m not sure what the whole is.
This is over 100 words now. Hmm. Maybe I should make the prompt 250 words? BOOM. It’s an easter egg.
The whole. Right, I was going to write about what coherent whole I am building. Oh, and the object. Right in front of me. What is it?
It’s the United Airlines Safety Card. It describes what to do in an emergency, but, ya’know, it’s a comic book. Hand-drawn characters telling a story you hope never happens. To me, that’s all I’m doing when I write: telling a story. The coherent whole is how to tell stories; how are you going to tell stories?
Storytelling starts with the irrepressible urge to write a thought. The thought becomes a story when you find random, genuine bits of your day to weave the thought into a story, but the hallmark of a great story is we don’t know if it’s going to work out.