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.
Recently a friend asked me how I can come up with something new every day. I said by relying on what’s not new. I tune in as much as I can to what’s going on around me, always toting paper and pen for taking notes, but I also review my idea file, use prompts of course, and scour whatever comes up in my mind when free-associating words and images. When fishing for ideas leads to childhood I have to follow, because I need everything I’ve got to keep this challenge going. Lately I’ve been alternating between a week of prompts and a week of random inspiration. Today marks the first day of a non-prompt week. Somehow I stumbled onto the memory of spelling bees in elementary school, and that inspired the day’s shorty.
Congrats to me for finishing off Week 33! Crème caramel all around! And the best sound of the week served as the day’s story prompt: gargling, selected by the husband from 
The day’s sound prompt was sleigh bells, selected by the husband at 
Applause! I started my day with a round of clapping, chosen by the husband at 
The husband chose the sound of a cash register from 
The sound prompt for the day was boiling water, selected by the husband from 
For the day’s shorty prompt, my husband chose from f
I’m writing this on December 18 but per usual, I’m back-dating to match the day I wrote the story I’m documenting in this post. First a word on this ongoing story-a-day challenge: This last week has been the hardest full week so far. I absolutely could not do anything more on this project than just get each day’s story written, and many days that was a close-run thing. But I did it. And I’m building a little energy again for documenting the process. The shorty for December 11 was inspired by the sound of a cricket chirping, which my husband selected from the site 
With this pretty platter of peanut brittle, one of my favorite treats, we celebrate another week of the Daily Shorty challenge. Mmmm. As for the day’s shorty, I can’t say much for it except that it kept itself nicely short. I seem to be going shorter all the time, which I find really interesting.
Back to the idea file to find another bit that’s been eluding me. Today it stopped eluding me.
I toss story-starts all the time, but if a start to a piece actually takes hold—I see the shape of the whole story, I know how to sweep to its end, the story has, in a way, taken on its own life—then I finish it as the day’s shorty, and if I still don’t like it, I just walk away knowing that one will never be on my submissions list. But before I walk away I craft, and re-craft, and craft again, rendering my crummy story as carefully as I can. It’s a strange feeling, tweaking something I don’t like, but I believe in making anything I write as good as it can be, even if it will never see the light of day.
Love this world-weary depiction of Santa (credit below). We’ve been decorating the apartment and otherwise getting ready for Christmas, which we always celebrate quietly but with great love and enthusiasm. So Santa is on my mind.
The water-related memories I generated yesterday served up another shorty today.
Yesterday when I went to the gym I saw a lovely bird hopping around the twiggy branches of a denuded tree right outside the main door. I am terrible about identifying birds, so I have no idea what it was, but it looked nothing like the bird pictured here (photo credit below), I just love this picture so much I had to post it. The bird I saw had plenty of soft blue and its head was striped with a really vivid yellow. He looked skittery to me (and yes, like a “he”) so I spoke to him in a whisper and then went on my way. I suppose it was that bird that inspired today’s shorty, which is delightfully short.
Do you know about whoopie pies? They’re traditional Maine treats, two pieces of cake sandwiched with a very thick layer of cream. I think the most common variety is chocolate cake with vanilla cream but they come in all flavors and they range from Hostess cupcake quality when bought at the grocery store (not that I am above that, believe me) to sublime, when bought from a good bakery. This one showcases one of my favorite flavor combinations–chocolate and orange–and so makes a perfect way to celebrate the completion of Week 31, my flirtation with postcards, which ended yesterday, December 3. The cream is “orange cream cheese buttercream” and you can see the zest if you look closely. Now I need a whoopie pie, stat.
Today’s inspirational postcard has a picture of Bates College’s Hathorn Hall (photo credit below). My husband works at Bates and we live within easy walking distance, so I’m on campus all the time. Hathorn is one of my favorite buildings. It just screams New England.
My inspiration postcard today pictures two young bull moose by the water, sparring. I couldn’t find a picture of two moose online that I like as well as the picture here (photo credit below) so a picture of one will have to do for this post. I have yet to see a moose in my 6+ years in Maine, mostly because I’m unlikely to see one from the couch. I would be delighted to see one of these goofy gus animals in person, but NOT, I sincerely hope, and thank you very much, in my headlights.
Oh, this glorious cake. It makes me giddy just to look at it. This beauty marks 7 months, my friends. I have been writing a story every single day for 7 months. That’s… insane. It is also, at this point, habit. Not easy habit, no. But even when I’m exhausted, when I’ve been forced to pay attention to something else all day, I’m telling myself, in the back of my mind, don’t forget your story, your story, your story, you have to write your story…! I will admit that I haven’t been writing winners, lately. When I devote a lot time and attention to something else, the writing definitely suffers. Which seems like something I really need to pay attention to when I go back to a normal life. Anyway, celebrate 7 months with me (that little piece of cake on the plate is for you) and wish me luck for… tomorrow. Just tomorrow. I never know if I’ll make it beyond tomorrow.
I really like the idea for this one but the execution… not so much. Hopefully I’ll work some magic in revision. As for my inspiration, I honestly have no clue how a postcard with the O’Keeffe painting pictured here (see photo credit below) led me to the story I wrote, which appears to have absolutely no connection to the painting. But after a meditation on the image and some note-taking, well, I wrote a story, and that’s that.
Today’s shorty was inspired by a postcard showing the Pissarro painting pictured here (photo credit below). It reminded me of Colonial Williamsburg, VA, on a blurry winter day, which in turn sparked the story.
Once again I find myself catching up on posts (I’m writing this on December 3). I’ve been working hard on polishing some of these shorties to submit to a chapbook contest—yeehaw! Wish me luck. In the meantime, my third postcard, which inspired my November 29 shortie, is one showing two pages from a scrapbook Isabella Gardner made to document a trip to Japan. Pictured here is one of the pages shown on the postcard (photo credit below). I’m slightly embarrassed to say that my plodding brain produced a story about… a scrapbooker. But what can you do. Next!
I have a postcard with the image shown here (see photo credit below) of Barry Flanagan’s sculpture “Thinker on a Rock.” I meditated on this wonderful man-like hare for quite some time and then landed on a certain famous manlike bunny we all know well…. So the day’s shorty turned out to be my first fan fiction!
I buy pretty postcards wherever I go just so they can sit on a shelf. Today I gathered a pile and went through them, selecting the most intriguing as I went. I kept whittling the pile until I had seven to use for story prompts this week. The first, chosen randomly from the seven, was imprinted with the photo you see here of an Edward Steichen painting (see photo credit below). Isn’t it stunning? It took most of the day for me to get a story out of this image because I was so enchanted with it all I could think of were more colors and shapes. Gorgeous.
People keep asking me if I bring back characters created for these shorties and I keep saying no while thinking that I should. Today I thought about previous stories with that idea in mind and one character came to me immediately, Yessiree Bob from the story of the same name written on 
In the second shorty inspired by my tenure in a dental office, my protagonist is a thwarted woman. My friends keep asking me if I’m seeing the same themes emerge in these shorties. Yes. Thwarted women. And thwarted men. All kinds of thwarting.
Once I jumped off the corporate train and decided to learn how to be a writer, I took various jobs to bring in a decent paycheck while the husband went back to school for his much more obvious and lucrative career-change path. One of the jobs I fell into during those years was at a dental office. In the 18 months or so I was there, I amassed enough material for several novels, if I could manage to move through those mental files without shivering. The other day I made myself take some notes on that experience and what I came up with inspired shorties two days in a row (I’m writing this story post on Monday the 26th). The shorty for the day happens to mark a “first” for me: I am almost certain that I have never used the word “pussy” in a story before. In fact I can’t remember ever having mentioned lady parts before at all, but if I did, I wouldn’t have used that word, as I tend to be priggish about crude words for lady parts (though I can talk like a sailor in every other way). Anyway, I used the word SEVEN times in this very short story. So I’m thinking I can go another 10 years of writing without using it again, yes?
This time a physical description from a conversation with a friend about someone she had met recently inspired the shorty. This challenge is teaching me how to find story in just about anything.
Daily Shorty 
