Inspired

I draw “inspiration” from Prose Challenges like this one. I like the prompts. I like to be prompted. Some prompts make me feel happy, so I write happy, some make me mad, so I write angry, but the prompts I choose to respond to always make me feel something. It is then on me to express that feeling well. Emotion, after all, is the heart of any story.

An example would be a recent prompt by @KeilanaA called, ”The Story of my First Love.” She added that her challenge could (or should) be “Fiction/ Non-fiction.“ Now that intrigued me. I read that to mean we were to mix fiction and non-fiction, a mash-up if you will. That might have been a misinterpretation on my part, but that is ok too. Are we not allowed to interpret a prompt any way we want to? KeilanaA was asking me to write about my first love… and she was allowing me to fictionalize it, or to “stretch it.” Well, Yee-haw! That is what I almost always do anyways! I write about my experiences and I stretch them. Stretching is what makes writing fun (and reading I might add). Hell, stretching made Mark Twain, the greatest stretcher of them all, two seperate fortunes!

So I wrote a story about my first love like KeilanaA asked me to and I guess I have stretched the hell out of it. I must be stretching it like taffy. I say I must be stretching because it has become long. Really long. So long that I am only half-way through it and the prompt is already over. But I am having a ton of fun writing and remembering, and when I read back I realize that I didn’t really stretch all that much after all. I have shrunk it, in fact, deleting the mundane.

It’s slowly turning into a what I think is a pretty good coming of age story. To make it more interesting for me to write I took a different point-of-view... I became her. Now there is a stretch, lol. Granted, writing from her viewpoint means I am assuming a lot, but I don’t think I am too far off the mark with my assumptions. This girl was very transparent, after all. She left little guesswork. She always spoke her heart, good or bad. I guess she learned that from her terrific mother, a woman I admired very much. Looking at our relationship from this angle has forced me to look at myself in a bright new light that ain’t always flattering, and is sometimes downright ugly.

My character, the villain in the story is, or was, a sixteen/seventeen year old with raging hormones. Those kinds rarely make the best decisions, or choose the right girl (more is the pity), and this stupid character is no exception. But hey, that kid lived and he learned. He ultimately used these experiences to find the right girl, and those experiences taught him to treat this new girl better, so that he wouldn’t ever lose her.

And the heroine moved on easily enough. She married a man better suited to her, and they have made a happy family out there somewhere, I hope.

I’m a little worried about my wife reading it. She has a jealous bone, you know? So I may never finish the story (I already know the end, and now you do too), so there is really no need to finish. The prompt has ended, and not finishing it is no tragedy. Hell, my “drafts” are littered with unfinished tales. What is one more?

Anyways, getting back to prompts. I loved the one KeilanaA offered up. It led me down a memory lane I have not walked in a long time, and it inspired me to try to tell that story.

And I loved this prompt by @Meadow, as it allowed me to share my inspiration. The “Challenges” that Prose and that Proser’s supply are the reason I stick around the site.

So thank you Meadow, and thank you KeilanaA for the challenges. And I thank all of you other Proser’s who inspire me every day.