Another Month, Another Prompt

Happy Friday!

I've had very little time to blog lately -- I'm racing against end-of-the-month deadlines, and in my spare time, it seems I'm rebuilding our entire house from the ground up. So far this summer, we've repainted the whole interior, refinished all our floors, rebuilt fascia and soffits, replaced the hot water heater, screwed up our plumbing, and landscaped most of the backyard. Next up: power wash and paint the roof. Then relay the stone path in the front yard.

Egad. Just reading the list is boring.

This means that all of my wonderful writing thoughts have been vanishing into the ether like so many little burps. Please excuse me.

But I haven't forgotten: Monday is the first Monday of the new month, so I'm going to post the August story prompt. Rules are the same as last time, except I'll start taking and posting stories the following Monday if anybody is ready. If you're new to this, here it is in a nutshell: I post a prompt. You write a short story of 1,000 words or less. I post it. People comment.

See? Simple.

Last time, I was thoroughly impressed with the quality of the writing and the different directions everybody went -- yet there were common themes among many of the stories. And I got a new character out of it who will almost definitely turn up in a book at some point. So, I know there were a few lurkers out there ... if you want to write this time around, I'd love to post it.

Have a good weekend, and check back Monday for the August prompt.

My Favorite Book

Is it unusual to have a favorite book? I've been asking around, and I get a lot of, "Well, I don't really have a favorite book. I like A LOT of books." Or, "It depends on the day and my mood." Or, "My favorite book is [whatever I read in third grade, because it was the last book I really read]."

I definitely have a favorite book, but I'm afraid this makes me very weird. My favorite book is one of the most dreaded books in the English language, even though I just can't see why people despise this book so much. I've never really met anybody else who loved it the way I love it. Truth is, I haven't actually met many people who've read it at all.

I remember one summer ... I was 20 years old and I was home from college for the summer. I was living on my mom's couch that summer, and working with a friend of mine in his window-washing business. We set our own hours and made good money, working for ourselves. I went out bar-hopping almost every night -- it turned out this was the last summer I would ever spend in my hometown. Turned out, that was true for a lot of us, but we didn't know it then.

I'd get home late every night. Two, three, four in the morning. But instead of sleeping, I'd lay on my couch (sometimes gently spinning) and read Moby Dick. This wasn't my first time through it, but it was the first time the book really grabbed me. I can still remember individual sentences and images and the way they wound into my brain. In some very real ways, my dreams were shaped by Moby Dick on those late summer nights.

Two years later, I read it again, this time while I was living in the South Pacific, near the same stretches of ocean the Pequod plowed through. And then again, and again, and again.

Why Moby Dick? There really isn't time, but just because of everything. It has seafaring adventure, symbolism and theme of the deepest order, the best depiction of madness on paper I've ever seen, and all those glorious passages about the whale and the hunt. It's so much more than the sum of its parts. It has meaning on a level that feels almost post-linguistic, as if it operates on a cellular plane. To me, Moby Dick is near the pinnacle of artistic expression.

Moby Dick is the book I wish I could write.

What about you?

A Knife to the Throat

I guess you could say I'm a cynical reader. Remember during the publication of Harry Potter, when seemingly sane people worried that she might kill Harry? I always thought this was ridiculous. Of course she wasn't going to kill Harry. He was the HERO. They always survive.

But, looking back now, I can better appreciate what Rowling did. She had millions of people worried that Harry might actually die. She had the knife to his throat, and for lots of people, it was entirely possible she might use it.

Nice.

I love a good action scene -- truly, I do -- but that's a lot different than actually exposing your characters to mortal danger (or psychological or emotional danger). I wonder if sometimes, writers head into action scenes already emotionally knowing their character will survive. That's risky, because it bleeds into the emotional arc of the scene. The danger isn't felt as deeply as it could be because the conclusion is foregone. The lows aren't as low, so the highs can't be as high. In other words, we're leaving something on the table. The stakes aren't as high as they could be, aren't even as high as they appear to be.

Maybe next time I write an action scene, I'll kill off the main character. Just to scare myself silly, and so can I really feel it, so I know intimately what kind of fate I'm avoiding. I can always save him on the rewrite.