Terror grabbed my lungs in its sweaty fist and squeezed. No stick curved like that thing in the sand.
A bite from a venomous viper wasn’t on my bucket list. Panting, I moved only my eyes.
Black diamonds undulated and dry grass crackled.
Maybe I scared him too.
I have once again written in response to the weekly prompt offered by @jayna.
This time the little bonus to the story is about writer’s block. We all get it from time to time. It hit me this week. I didn’t write this story until last night. I’d tried–and failed–several times during the week to come up with something for this prompt. After we got a poisonous snake in our greenhouse, I tried to use it for inspiration but continued to fail.
I had given up yesterday, deciding I just wouldn’t manage to do anything this week. I was frustrated, but somewhat okay with it, because I’ve been sick with a bad migraine and had to go to the chiropractor for treatment, which gives nasty backlash effects. So I was telling myself it was okay to fail.
Then last night, after I’d gone to bed for the night, inspiration struck when I was three-quarters of the way asleep. This story just popped into my head. I got my tablet down and scribbled. I did a little bit of midnight editing and ended up with a 48 word story.
This morning I shared my draft with my peer review group and a strange thing happened–the only change was to swap the order on the first and second sentence. The second sentence made a stronger opener and the swap prevented the image of the first from replacing the image of the not-a-stick.
So we need to accept as writers that sometimes we just can’t manage a particular prompt in a short time frame. Sometimes we need some down time to recover from other things or perhaps our brain is just stuck in another story–a problem I was also dealing with all week. My brain is in another story I’m working on and didn’t want to refocus. Brand and Spark are demanding I think about them.
But then when I accepted it was okay to fail, inspiration struck. I listened to it and got the words down, as you can see. Don’t ignore inspiration, even if your first impulse is “This sucks.”
