Today the husband dropped a Styrofoam ball into my outstretched hands. And in response I wrote a creepy story he much approves—the husband really enjoys creepy—which is only right.
Working Title: Your Words
1st Sentence: The squeak of Styrofoam still makes my heart skip.
Favorite Sentence: For example if I stab my single allotted Styrofoam ball with a pen—one sharp squeak—and then hold up the pen, the ball sitting nicely atop, and announce that I have made a doll, I get a check-mark.
Word Length: 1,052
Photo by Saurahb R. Patil 12/2011.
Many years ago—I think I was still in high school—a man in our rural neighborhood plowed under his wife’s strawberry patch as punishment for something they had argued about. She was known for the amazing strawberries she harvested every summer, which might have been the problem—they were deeply religious and he often cited her pride for those berries and other accomplishments (she was an incredible seamstress and a wonderful cook) as regrettable sin she should repent. As even I know, despite two thumbs that will never shade green, it takes many years of devotion to get really sweet, fat berries, so when he destroyed her patch he was destroying years of work and love. I cried when I heard the story, because it struck me as such a cruel, hateful thing to do. The wife, also known for her unbreakable good cheer, replanted and carried on. Back to the present: The texture of the day was a small, soft, squishy puffball. It reminded me of cat fur and so inspired the first sentence of my story.
The husband handed me a piece of a geode this morning (it looks almost exactly like this picture I pulled from the Web), the texture (and inevitably the look) of which inspired one aspect of the protagonist of this gleefully short story. Yesterday the look of my “texture prompt” definitely inspired the story more than the feel of it. Maybe I should do my best to lock onto my story idea while holding my texture prompt with eyes closed, so that it’s more likely I’ll focus on the sense of touch in the inspired story? Or maybe I should just be glad every time I get an idea that develops into a story and not give into the temptation to grade my process. Yeah, that.
I am shocked and thrilled that I have written a story every single day for six months straight. And honestly, I’m afraid to say much more than that. Taking this project one day at a time has been crucially important since, oh, I finished May, so I’m not going to change tactics now. As for my virtual celebration treat, is it not exquisite?? I wanted to put up a picture of caramel apples—my all-time favorite Halloween treat—but although I bought the stuff to make them, I wound up devoting that time to watching a couple of Halloween-themed shows the husband and I love. And I couldn’t find a good picture online that I was free to use. So this fabulous caramel apple cheesecake will just have to do. I can’t say I’m disappointed. As for the day’s shorty, it was inspired both by a “page weight” my husband handed me this morning, an object archivists use to hold down the page of a book that shouldn’t be touched by the reader, and by Halloween. The page weight looks and feels like nothing so much as an oddly weighted shoe string, which inspired the first line of the story.
Trying a new set of prompts this week based on texture. I have asked the devoted husband to present me, each morning of this 27th week of my Daily Shorty challenge, with an object that has a notable and uniform texture. Today a rubber eraser, which inspired the first line of my shorty. After the first paragraph, the story went bonkers, in the same way that one of Barthelme’s really goofy, “What on earth is he on about” stories skip across the page just for fun. Not to suggest that my shorty lives in the same house as a Barthelme story. More to say that I thought of him as I wrote it. My story is out on the sidewalk, gazing up at a Barthelme story’s window, blowing kisses.
And a fond farewell to Week 26! One of my all-time favorite treats is pistachio ice cream—enjoy it with me as I celebrate another completed week of the Daily Shorty challenge. The last inspiration I pulled from my mystery box was part of the top of a corroded aerosol can, which got me fixated on the thought of hairspray. I covered three pages with various ideas and story starts related to hairspray—I couldn’t shake the image of it—and finally landed on a story as list using that number again: 7. Many thanks, again, to Jen Hicks. I love saying this: I owe you one!
It took this Daily Shorty project to teach me what a joy it can be to write in a parking lot. There’s something so… in between about that space, so not-place about it—it nicely empties your mind of whatever’s bugging you so story ideas can rush in. Now when I find myself in a parking lot, I see my time there as “found time” in the same way that I consider that five dollar bill I just pulled from the pocket of a jacket “found money.” I wrote today’s shorty in the lot of the local Hannaford while the husband, grateful to be free of my label-reading attention, restocked our pantry and fridge. My mystery box inspiration today was a black and white photo of a man in work clothes at a table covered in tools. Looks like he’s in a large space—a factory? And the photo looks period. Maybe the 1930s, 1940s? The tools inspired my story, so here I’ve put up a picture of a toolbox. One more day of the mystery box!
My week is going faster than usual, even, because I’m doing so much editing. Hoping for a much lighter November. I hand-wrote today’s shorty, which is something I haven’t done in a while. I highly recommend going back and forth between hand-writing and composing on the keyboard. There’s something so sensual about running a pen across the page—I think I access my writing brain a little differently. The photo shows today’s inspiration—a little notion that looks like a button (but isn’t) resting on the paper I used to write the story. The notion is embossed with the figure of a… moth… butterfly… dragonfly? I saw a dragonfly at first, so that’s what inspired my story. Now I’m not so sure, but the story, in any case, is a wrap.
Today’s inspiration: a torn piece from a catalog. On one side of the page is a lovely young woman with long blond hair in a prettified out-doors-ey outfit that includes a fancy scarf. On the other side, a sweet, girlish, hand-crafty bracelet at top and a rockin’ pair of studded harness boots at bottom. I studied both sides of the page for something around 5 minutes, then wrote a story that included none of these things but did feature a photographer trying to take pretty pictures. My silly image at the top of the post is a goofy catalog-page-like decoration that I assembled from pretty pics of things similar to what’s on my page scrap.
Inspiration sprang from my box today in the form of two rusty nails, which reminded me of one of the things my mother warned me about when I was a kid. Don’t go out barefoot or you’ll step on a rusty nail and then you’ll get lockjaw! I thought that was a really funny threat until I read a coming of age book set at the turn of the century or thereabouts, when young ladies wore bloomers and dresses and tied their hair back with ribbons, and, according to this book, planned their nuptials at the tender age of 14. The main character’s love—a feisty and loyal young man with raven hair—was thrown from a carriage and cut himself on the wagon wheel. And then died a gruesome, slow-motion death owing to, yes, lockjaw. She held his grotesquely grinning face to her budding breast and sobbed the same tears I silently shed under my bedcovers around 2:00 in the morning with my father’s filched mini-flashlight. How would our heroine ever know love again? Oh. Too, too cruel.
The lovely and talented Jen Hicks, writer friend and Hunger Mountain colleague, recently sent me a mystery box all the way from her home in St. Paul. She just said, hey, what’s your address, and a few weeks later comes a box with random goodies I can use for story prompts. What a treat! Today’s shorty was inspired by the first thing I fished out of the box, the button pictured very badly here because I wield a camera about as well as I can throw a ball—but get out of my way if I’ve got a Frisbee (just sayin’). The button says “Restore Monkey Island” and has a picture of a banana on it. Love it! The story I don’t love as much because I couldn’t compress my vision enough but it’s got a lot of potential for when I can come back to revise.
And adieu to Week 25! Enjoy with me this pretty éclair as I celebrate another completed week of this project. Many thanks again to Leslie Anderson for her inspirational paintings posted at 
Back to the well of inspiration from the Leslie Anderson paintings posted at 
So thankful for these lovely paintings by Leslie Anderson and to 
I hope my Maine writer friends will be entering this short story 
Maine writers, here’s a short story 
Maine writers, take note! The 
A logical progression! But don’t think about that, think about this gorgeous baked Alaska you may share with me as I celebrate finishing Week 24!
The husband points out a new theme in my shorties: cultish religion. Why? I don’t know. Maybe because I recently saw “The Master”?
Today’s shorty came right off the top of my head, inspired by something silly I said to my husband earlier in the day. And I like it!
Sometimes I get a story idea that I really like but I can’t produce a single decent sentence to get me going, so I type the idea into a running Idea File and move on. The idea that inspired this story occurred to me a couple of months ago, then went to the Idea File after I gave it a good try and failed to produce anything. I didn’t have to find it in the file, though, because it’s been sitting in the back of my mind, waiting for me to luck into that decent sentence. Today: Score!
I’m still getting a fair amount of shorties that come in odd packages. I’ve written a lot of stories in different narrative forms (e.g., cosmetic package instructions, a brochure), so I don’t mean that. I mean that once I got into my third month of shorties, I started getting these little globs of story that feel complete but don’t have an obvious story arc. Today’s shorty is one of these and it ends with a kind of word-tic that I would never have tried if I weren’t pushed to extremes by this project. But why not??
I want to know if the things I’ve learned in this experiment can help me with old problems. So far the answer is more yes than no. A story I started a couple of years ago came back to me today. I opened the old file, looked at all the text (something over 3,000 words) and notes about what I wanted to accomplish, and just felt tired. Then the truer bits began to show themselves and I realized that this was a clear case of “vision run wild.” There was a simple story trying to get out of all that mess. So I wrote that simple story as the day’s shorty.
I like the easy ones! Next!
Crème brûlée for me for finishing another week! Isn’t it lovely? Today I tried a new kind of reclaiming of material. I have been working on the foundation story for a linked collection for about three years. The story is over-ambitious, and, so far, un-write-able. I’ve produced something like a 100 pages of material but still don’t have the right draft—soooo frustrating and possibly responsible for this project. The last 5 months have been a welcome (if labor-intensive) break from The Unfinishable Story. Since I’ve been doing so much reclaiming, lately, I got it in my head today to grab a chunk of that story and try to create a shorty out of it. I had fun with it but I don’t think I was successful, really. It’s a complete shorty but it has no punch. Maybe I’ll try again or maybe I’ll write shorties for some of the other characters in that world. Or maybe that’s just playing with fire….
I try to suspend judgment to some extent because this experiment is all about process and practice. We all write material we discard and we almost always produce our best work only after careful, thoughtful revision. But sometimes I can’t help but get cranky. Today’s shorty came from a scene I wrote a week or two ago then cut from a story because it didn’t belong. But the scene was good. I saw how to make something of it, so I did. I made a very nicely crafted, well-written piece of CRAP.
I love it when I can reclaim material. I wrote part of today’s story a few weeks ago but I couldn’t get into it. It stuck in my mind, though, and today I decided to give it another shot. This time: A story! Of course, that means I didn’t use today that process I talked about at the start of the week but I’m too excited to care.
My dad’s a bit of a hoarder and I catch myself drifting that way occasionally. One day I might write a good story about hoarding. But not today. Next, please.
Day 3 of this process of trying to force connections between three paragraphs generated in succession but without obvious surface connection, then developing story form there. For today’s shorty I wound up building the story from the first two and cutting the third original paragraph. I like the third paragraph so I’ll try starting the next story with that one.
Daily Shorty 