I apologize for the length of time between posts; it’s been a crazy month! Anniversaries; endoscopies; cooking and planting; furniture shopping; reading like crazy; T-shirt redesigning like crazy… time flies! So today, let’s play with the concept of absence. Imagine that you (or one of your fictional characters) has been absent from home, friends, and family for some time with no word. As far as those people are concerned, the absence has been unexplained. They might have at least known that you planned to go away for a while, or they might have reported you missing.

Write the scene in which you or your character returns home.

Story starters are simple lines or paragraphs that you can use to start off a writing exercise. Just put it at the top of a piece of paper or file and go. You can use it directly as the first line of a piece, or use it as inspiration. Of course you could also get a bit more creative and use it as the last line, or incorporate it into the middle somewhere. You could re-phrase or re-write the starter if it better suits your story. But for the purposes of a quick exercise, it’s usually easiest to just use it as the first line of your writing. Today’s story starter is:

“The smell is coming from that ambulance.”

There’s a meme going around the book blogging community that goes roughly like this: you open a book to a certain page, find a line a certain number of sentences into that page, and then quote the next several sentences. At face value this sounds kind of uninteresting, but in practice it results in some absolutely fascinating out of context quotes. When you reach deep into a story and take several lines on their own like that, they can often spur the imagination in interesting ways.

Today, pick up a book and open to a random page, preferably one at least a little ways in and preferably among pages you haven’t read yet (even better, from a book you haven’t read yet). Locate the third sentence on the page, and then copy down the following three lines.

Using these three lines as the beginning or end of your piece (or inserting them somewhere in the middle), free-write for five to fifteen minutes.

Mystery Addict
Where’s the body?

My grandfather, who moved to the United States from Holland when my mother was just a child, had some interesting habits. One of them, apparently, was to keep several gold bars which he buried somewhere on his property. Now and then he would move them from place to place. He grew up in Europe during troubled times—lived there through (and was involved in) both World Wars—so I don’t think keeping this sort of cache is particularly odd for him. However, it makes for a fascinating story, as does the fact that after his death, the bars were never found despite the use of a metal detector around his property. They could be there still (it wasn’t a particularly small property—we’re talking rural Vermont, and his home included a pond and an apple orchard), or maybe he sold them at some point in order to buy items from the companies that kept trying to convince him he’d ‘already won’ this or that sweepstakes. (He was a brilliant man, but that was one of his quirks as he aged—he was very prone to believing those claims.) Regardless of what happened to those bars, it makes a great set-up for any number of stories.

Your story could start with the new family that buys the property and eventually finds Opa’s cache of gold bars. It could center around what he did with those gold bars and why they aren’t on the property any more. It could center around the last years of a fascinating man’s life—the kind of man who would bury gold bars on his property yet fall prey to sweepstakes scams as he passed into his nineties.

By the way, here’s another cool detail about my grandfather: he’s the Dr. Jacobus Rinse mentioned in this article. He was indeed diagnosed with heart troubles in his 50s such that he was given little time to live, and, in a move that was far ahead of his time, he went on to perform research on such things as cholesterol and trans-fats that led him to develop a breakfast formula that helped people worldwide. After that diagnosis he lived to be 94, and even then he died not of natural causes, but when he attempted to save the life of a younger friend who started to drown while swimming in the pond on his property. Right until the end he was walking his own dog and chopping firewood.

So today, write about a grandparent, or someone old enough to be a grandparent. We so often think of the elderly as not terribly interesting, when the exact opposite is true: these are people who’ve lived terribly rich lives and have abundant stories to tell. Try to write a short story that hints at these stories through details (such as the moving gold cache and entering every sweepstakes) without spelling out the person’s history. You might even tell the story through the eyes of that family who subsequently moved into the old man’s house, creating an image of a man without his direct presence.

You can use my grandfather’s details as the basis for your story, use a relative of your own, or make up a fictional character.

Edited to add: I happened to find a brief tale of gold that made me think of this.

It’s high time I did another “prompt on the web”—a link to a nifty prompt found on someone else’s site so you can get all SORTS of inspiration from everywhere! Today’s inspiration comes from Design your writing life, and I insist, insist, that you check out the prompt, Paddling in the Kayak, a Wiki Parable. I was hooked from the first two phrases:

Once upon a time, just yesterday, …

So go to it! Read the parable’s beginning and continue it from there!

Once again, use the following story starter to begin a piece of fiction:

“When she said the school was full of zombies, I thought she was speaking metaphorically. Who hasn’t felt that way about their classmates and teachers at one time or another? But no, when I arrived for parent-teacher conferences I found not a bored teacher, but one with her skin stretched taut over her skull, patches of bone visible through ragged holes. Flies buzzed around flesh that was half-rotted, half-cured by the desert sun. She smiled at me with teeth that looked huge without the flesh of now-receded gums and lips to keep them in context.”

Use the following story starter to begin a piece of fiction:

“Butterflies. She’d called me to make the hour-long drive to her house first thing in the morning because of butterflies. Admittedly, it seemed more than a little odd to see hundreds of them flitting about in such a small garden space, and their vivid blue coloration was striking to say the least. But still—butterflies?”

Today, turn the following story starter into a piece of fiction:

“Cats of all shapes, sizes and colors flooded through the open doorway. Calico and tortoisheshell, seal-point and tabby, tiny kittens and huge bruisers, they made their way out of the warehouse with a calling and shrieking that must have been audible throughout the district.”

I’ve fallen for Dionys Moser’s desert photos. They are some of the most striking, beautiful, colorful works I’ve ever seen. Every single one of them could spawn an entire world or story. Today, write a scene that takes place in the following image (click through for the larger version) or, if you prefer, one of Moser’s others:

Children’s book authors Glen and Karen Bledsoe have helpfully provided a set of writing prompt generators. One provides a phrase (”the [adjective] [noun] that went [verb/phrase]”). For example:

The shy scratching post that went fishing

The second provides three random items, to be combined in a story. For example:

A zucchini squash, a fishing rod, and a Tarot deck.

The final generator is a complex piece that provides a plot out of the following building blocks: protagonist, antagonist, setting, goal, an important event, and an important object.

Today, use one of the above examples, or go to the page and randomize your own. Enjoy, and pay a visit to the Bledsoes’ page frequently!

Gravity Wins