Over the years taking various kinds of writing workshops and classes, I’ve found that when teachers offer writing prompts, the prompts often contain an image or phrase that is particularly clever or strange or otherwise arresting. I find that this sort of prompt is unhelpful because it claims so much energy for itself and the point of the subsequent writing winds up being about trying to make sense of the prompt rather than really letting story take hold and carry the writing someplace new and interesting. An ordinary sentence can make a better prompt because it allows more space for invention. Today’s shorty was inspired by this simple prompt that came to me while searching for an idea: She should have left him when X.
Working Title: When He Left
1st Sentence: She could have, probably should have left him when he blew through their savings in Aruba with that gal his department had just hired to help with the year-end audit (her hire had a lot more to do with rear-end than year-end).
Favorite Sentence: It wasn’t so much the faking of her signature on the contract for the house or the flirtation with being homeless that made her hate him so intensely for about nine minutes, it was more that he was discovering the fad of “juicing” twenty years too late.
Word Length: 423
Photo of a juicer-blender by RanjithSiji, 12/2010, permission cc-by-sa-3.0,GFDL.
Daily Shorty 
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