The Daily Prompt

I read the daily prompt everyday.  I often use it to help me in my writing.  Rarely does any of that writing end up here.  It normally stays within the confines of my notebook(s).  (I guess I am somewhat old fashioned because all of my writing begins with a pencil and a notebook. My daughter compares my love of pencils to the the usage of quills and ink in 2013. *shrug*)  Anyway there was a prompt earlier this week that asked us to get our most persistent characters out of our heads and into print.  I really had no persistent characters so I started to dismiss the prompt out of hand.  The prompt went on to tell us that the character could be anything of our choosing whether animate or inanimate.  I decided to reread the prompt and search my head to see if I had anything to fit the bill.  I figured I would get a short scene out of it.   I decided that my character would be my home city.  Now for the last few days different scenes have been popping up.  These scenes are fully populated by people I have never met before.  One young lady seems to be the starring attraction as she is the commonality among all the scenes.  I really don’t know what this means.  I mean I used to have characters in my head all the time when I was a kid.  Writing was my escape from stress so I engaged in it frequently.  I was always writing short stories or poetry.  I filled hundreds of notebooks.  I dreamed of being a best selling author or Pulitzer Prize winning journalist.  But then life interrupted my dreams.  I had little people populating my waking and sleeping hours because I became a mother to 7.  I had adult responsibilities to my parents, siblings, husband and children so I really had no room for the characters that took up residence in my head.  They received eviction notices and quietly moved.  I stuck to writing essays and poetry because that could be done in a matter of minutes instead of the long term commitment to birth fully actualized characters.  Now with the reading of that daily prompt people have once again taken up residence in my head.  I am scared because I don’t know what they really want from me.  I hope they don’t plan to hold me hostage because I still don’t have the time to tell their stories.  I don’t think I have the talent either.  I hope that the young lady is just trying to show me her back story before she demands my attention be turned to trying to tell her tale.  I am going to try an resist reading any more of those cursed daily prompts… Yeah right I’ll be back at them again tomorrow.  

 

 

“She stepped out into the type of day that felt as if it could shatter at any time.  The brittle rays of the sun raked across her sun stroked skin. She inhaled a lung full of cactus needles and exhaled the fragrance of desert blooms.  She stood with the bearing of an Amazon queen among the leathery people of her current reign .  Her braids swayed in the convection breeze.  She looked out onto a street that just a few years earlier was a frequent witness for the tumbleweeds.”