Why Did I Come Here?
Table of contents for 13/ Writing
One of the blogs in the blogroll here is Pumping Your Muse Prompts and it is a collection of photos and simple writing assignments. I recommend it to those of you who are interested in writing more and exercising your imagination while you do it.
For example this morning I chose to do an exercise about a parked car and was asked to focus on emotion, smell and sound. In keeping with my present dark mood I set the scene before dawn in a rundown city area. And here is what happened!
He sank down in the seat of his Chevrolet and waited for the morning light. He had spent most of the night in the bar up the street and only left because he felt uncomfortably close to an altercation with the stranger in the corner booth. Why had the man approached him as he was leaving? What did he want?
His car was strewn with empty Budweiser bottles and the smell of spilled beer and cigarettes mixed with the sharp odor of gasoline. The car wouldn’t start. He had flooded the feeble carburetor.
And suddenly his mind was flooded with fear as he saw the door of the bar swing open and the man burst through it and head down the sidewalk in his direction. The street was silent except for the sound of his purposeful walk.
“I need some help” he thought. But there was no one near and the hulking shadow under the street light continued in his direction.
“I am lost” he whispered to himself and he once again checked all the locks on the doors. But the sudden loud report of glass cracking into hundreds of tiny islands desperately hanging together came a second later.
“I should get out of the car” he said and suddenly rage filled him like a spark that threatened to turn the interior of the fume filled vehicle into a ball of flame.
He reached across his body with his violently shaking hand and released the lock. And with his left hand he pulled up on the handle. His feet hit the pavement and his weary frame suddenly weary no more stood up to meet his assailant.
He picked up the rock embedded in his windshield and thought about heaving it in the direction from which it had arrived. But a rock is a feeble weapon when pitted against a rather large handgun.
And this he could see as it was raised in his direction.
“What have I done?” he thought as light began to color the lonely street of this old and often violent city. “Why did I come here ?” and the answer came not in words but in the flash of the gun and a loud sound that somehow was all mixed up with a brief moment of pain as the street, his car and the shadowy figure now just a few feet away all exploded.
And suddenly he was looking down on a man lying in the street next to a green 1975 Chevrolet while another man turned and ran down the sidewalk.
He turned and looked in a window across the street because he heard a baby crying. And he suddenly knew that the small child was hungry and afraid and wanted his mother. Because he dreamed of ghosts in the night.
The child’s dream was disturbed as the light crept through the tattered shade of his bedroom window and he wanted to be held by his mother who was just coming out of the bar across the street.
She screamed as she saw the body of her friend lying on the pavement over a dark stream moving towards the gutter and the parked Chevrolet.
And slowly lights began to come on up and down the street as residents held their heads and turned their weary bodies towards a familiar sound and the beginning of another day.
***
You can start something like this and really not know where it is going for awhile. Just put yourself in the scene as an invisible bystander or one of the characters. Imagine somehow you dropped out of the sky and there is this unfortunate man sitting in his car. What is he thinking? What is going to happen?
I probably took this exercise somewhat far afield but no one is going to grade this thing. We are not in school anymore. Please let us not bring our teachers home with us!
