Gesture Prompt

It was a regular battle between me and my mother. I was dubbed the "car dj" when my dad wasn't around when I was in 6th grade and since my Mom worked at my high school, my duty followed me. On days when we had to go in an hour early (Alice had jazz band practice) and days when we barely made it on time (8:25! No time for a locker run), I would be scrolling up and down on my ipod's screen. In seventh grade, I quit playing Beatles' songs when my mom exclaimed "All their songs sound the same!"

For a long time, I tried to play things that would make her happy. She used to ask me to play Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1 everyday. That was before she went into therapy. By the time I was in my Junior year of high school, I started trying to play songs that I liked, that she didn't like. My playlists consisted of The Mountain Goats most off-key songs, the Teeth and Joe Jackson. I was waiting for, wanting, her to turn the music down so that I could turn it back up, louder. The gesture, the reason to snap at her and scowl; I was praying for it every time I put on Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod. Joni Mitchell wasn't played anymore, I used to play Cake's Nugget every week:

"heads of state who ride and wrangle,
who look at your face from more than one angle,
can cut you from their bloated budgets
like sharpened knives through chicken mcNuggets.

shut the fuck up.
shut the fuck up..."

Sometimes she would turn the music down. Sometimes she wouldn't. This was the closest to rebellion I ever got.

Prompt Four: Unsure Person

Describe a day in the life of a person who is unsure of him/herself.

(schoolgirl, old man, youth at war, a friend, autobiographical, ect)

submitted by my mother.

Prompt Three: Gesture

Write: not just about a gesture, but a piece that totally embodies the gesture. Like the 'where' piece, but with people (unless, of course, you choose to write about a cat's gesture, I'm sure that's acceptable as well)


If you still want to write the last one, or for this one as well, remember that this is creative writing, not necessarily non-fiction. This one was submitted by Hannah (thank you!!!), submit prompts if you want, of any type. If you have been writing about something in your head and can fit a prompt to it, that is one way to kill three birds with one stone (one for you, one for me, and one for everyone who doesn't have to endure my bad prompts).

One More

I never know if I should drink the next glass.

Alcohol is supposed to have certain effects on you. It is often dubbed ‘liquid courage’, it is used to reduce or remove inhibitions, to relax. But I never really get to that point. I drink a couple, and then after that it’s always a pondering of…should I?

I know what it does in theory, according to all those beer commercials and portrayals of frat parties in movies. But it never does as promised. If I’m upset it doesn’t make me happy, if I’m anxious because of the number of people around me, it doesn’t relax. In fact, if anything, it only makes me frustrated, because if it’s not fulfilling expectations, there must be something wrong with me.

And yet knowing this, I still often ending drinking one more after I already not really feel like drinking. Just one, hoping, that, perhaps it will be different for once.

It is trivial. It’s just one night and just one decision. It doesn’t really affect much, because I never really get drunk. But all the same, it causes me a moment of pause every time.

Prompt Two: Trivial Dilemmas

 There are dilemmas that we face daily. They aren't 'how would one go about bringing world peace?' or 'what exactly is Truth, does it even exist?' Sure we can think about these things time to time, but more often it's 'what shoes should I wear if it might rain but also might not' and 'should I eat more watermelon or should I keep myself dehydrated because otherwise I'll have to use the porta-potty and it's disgusting because there are 100s of people here' (can you feel the anxiety!?)

Write about a trivial dilemma that for one reason or another gets you on an internal rant. Look at the inter workings of your mind in terms of logic in the real world, in day-to-day life. This may seem really random right now, but you will probably catch yourself thinking about one (hopefully, that's what I'm betting on to make this worthwhile.)


P.S. Okay! Great! Feel free to comment on eachother's pieces-I will do so as well, I think it will give us more motivation if we see eachothers reactions :)
Also, you can, once again, submit topic ideas. They are harder to come up with than you think, it's a challenge in itself, and I would really appreciate your ideas.
3rdly I made some clarifications to the instructions about how to write this all, since there seemed to be some confusion. If you have any questions, just ask! I'm just trying to systematize it in some way.



(To post this or not to post this? On one hand, I don't actually know if this will work-I have doubts that other people encounter these dilemmas as often as I do, or will be inspired. On the other, I currently have not come up with any better ideas, nor has anyone else. Therefore it is either this or nothing, or putting up a prompt late (with no guarantee that it will not be this one) and so, yes, I shall post it.)

Hannah Prompt One

Lawn

In the grass, scores of new chipmunks leap and twist in their little jackets of flesh. I remember coming back from the ocean, or a lake, and seeing our lawn again as it really is: how small, how managed, how hemmed in by the neighbors’ fences and the side of our garage and the azalea bushes it is. We can hear dogs we have never met barking in nearby houses, the slamming of doors, other people’s phones ringing, a tumble of voices. I know all of these things, but I also, mysteriously, know a parallel sense of its infinite space.

One summer, my brother and I woke up early every morning to look in the Have-A-Heart trap our parents had set under the azaleas. There were frantic squirrels. A raccoon, once or twice. Two baby possums who had bloodied their snouts struggling against the wire cage. In the end, we never did catch the woodchuck. (Canny, grizzled, and placid, he never moved more than was necessary and, with his small black hands and his formidable incisors, meticulously demolished what vegetable matter there was surrounding him. He was never startled, but when disturbed, raised himself on his hind legs with slow deliberate gravity and looked at you fixedly until you took a single step too close, and then he ran).

In the spring, curled ferns march over their brick-bordered plantings and into the tangled grass. I dreamed once than in the little alley of overgrown cedars in the back, you could find a path of beaten earth that led all the way to the lip of a canyon overlooking, out a long way off, other houses, a sort of distant village I had never seen before, that certainly had never been there before.

It’s late afternoon. High above in the hazy distance, troops of clouds mass in portentous billows. I’m on the lawn, flat on my back, staring up at the sky and trying to feel buoyed by the shadow I know I’ve trapped beneath me. What I really feel is the way the heat flattens everything, drawing together the ground and the white sky, so that existence becomes merely schematic, two dimensional. But lawn and sky are drawn apart again by the bulk of faraway thunderheads piling up like pale nebulae.

It’s this vertiginous double movement that I can’t quite explain: the way the opening of this distance thrusts earth and sky apart even as the heat collapses the one into the other; and how what emerges is the dreamy impression that I may be falling or floating—and the neighbors, too, may be floating, each sprawled on their own green handkerchief-square lawn—across a blank void, a white hole composed only of vast distance and heat.

Rosette Prompt One

The house that my grandparents' lived in always did harbor dust. However, I think you're allowed a certain amount of dust in your house when you're older. And not because you, yourself are older, but because maybe your things are. These old, antiquated possessions deserve the seasoning that can quickly dignify them as objects that have perhaps seen more than the observer. And my grandparents' had a lot of those. This dresser, that clock, these lamps. I was used to being the youngest thing in that house for quite a long time. I never minded. No matter what I did or where I went, there was always more to see, do and discover in that old house. I would sock-slide across the exposed wood floors of the entry way and living room into the kitchen where the sunlight would pour in around me. It's then that she, my grandmother, would find me. Jingling into the kitchen from the creaking back door, she would be pinning her curly hair up, and smelling of french perfume baked into her from the summer sun. Everything was yellow in those moments, the kitchen, the singing canary, my grandmother. She would fetch me the coldest water. No ice, but mint. The water from the tap at that house was always so perfectly cold and crisp. I would sip my water as she fussed with my hair, smoothing, braiding, and pinning. Ever since my grandmother died and my grandfather moved out of that house, I've often dreamed of that water. It sounds ridiculous but I have searched and tried too desperately to re-create that perfect taste. There is most certainly a chance that I will never succeed. But I think there might be more to that water than the fresh mint and the mineral balance from the water ditstrict. And I may just have to collect some dust of my own to figure out what that is.

Waverly

I’d like to say "I’d never given it much thought before," because I like the way it sounds. It implies a sort of philosophical view and discovery: “I have not thought about it before, but now am willing to examine the full depth and beauty of this wonderful idea or thing and discover something that is ultimately life-changing.” But the truth is, I have. I’ve given it a lot more thought than would seem necessary to give a train station.

There are stagnant puddles that never seem to evaporate on the landings that break up the stairs to the rest of the town above. I am suspicious of these and avoid stepping in them, because the station smells slightly of urine, though I’ve never seen anyone pissing there and can’t imagine why anyone would.  To my knowledge, there are no homeless fellows that live down there; Belmont isn’t that kind of town. And since I have stood, on the platform, waiting, at 12:27 am, if there were any homeless people living there, I probably would have seen them. However, there is usually no one but me, or me and a friend who walked me there, and once or twice, me and a couple of teenagers makingout.

The conductors, of course, have a tendency to think that I was up to something, because there’s no good reason to be going home that late from Waverly to Kendal Green. And maybe rightly so, for it did gave me the independence a teenager from boring white suburbia wanted-a way to hang out with friends that lived a couple towns over, and a venue to photograph them, on the rooftop above the bench and stairs, at night. Fun, and maybe even possibly illegal (oh the thrill of barely doing anything wrong, ever!)

The walls are salmon pink, which is a much more interesting color than any of the other stations I get off at. Sometimes, if I stay the night and am waiting in the morning, I study the wall on my side of the tracks in greater detail: I can see the crackles, the orange sparks and red veins, and where the paint has been chipped away, the blue gray of the cement underneath.  On the opposite side, there are streaks of lighter pink (or…more accurately, they exist on both sides but I can see them more clearly from a distance,) formed from the greater flow of water due to the way the hand rail above is structured. The water collects on the metal rectangles, runs down to the corners, and washed down the wall. In two places this pattern is broken, where fresh paint has been applied to cover up graffiti. For a very long time it said “yoonder” on the left hand side of the station, underneath the road-bridge. More recently, in big letters, left to right, bottom down, above the roof that covers the stairs that go up, it said:

from     save

heaven me

                -which is one of those flexible things that can be interpreted by me for myself. I can think….here, this town, is my heaven. My haven from home, an accessible taste of independence for a person without a car, and here I am waiting for the train to save me from it and bring me to a good nights’ rest. Though somehow I seriously doubt that the writer meant anything like that.

                I don’t mind the drunk sports fans on some nights, but I do mind the throw up that is caused by them. I like eavesdropping on conversations, but I hate looking for a set of seats that’s empty and finding none. I don’t enjoy shelling out money to the conductor, but I like it when they don’t bother to come to collect the fare. The worst is though, when fresh snow is lying all around and still coming down, seeing the tracks are clean, and trying to convince myself that, maybe, perhaps, possibly, I have not missed the train, have not lost a sliver of independence, and don’t have to irritate my parents by asking them to disrupt their plans and pick me up after the last train has gone.That there is still a 'next train' coming to this pink, stinking platform.

Prompt One Margaret

Hallie's room couldn't have existed this way for more than I few months, but I only saw it in this one state. Her room was off the long hallway next to the staircase on the second floor. All along the wall were the Woodhead-Nutting's three daughters school photos. They grow before your eyes in a cheesing smile kind of way. Hallie's emotions ranged from angry to ecstatic, not in that order. Her door had a “Caution” sign that she took from a construction site.

Madeleine and Hayley had led me into her room with quiet voices. She was out, they didn't know where, they told me that it was not uncommon for her to disappear on weekends. Her door opened to, what seemed to my nine-year-old eyes, a pit of clothes. Piled up on her futon, flung on her desk and it's chair and all over the carpet. There were piles of books, some text books, some novels circling her bed and all along her walls. The air in her room was still, like her one window had never been opened and the central air had been blocked. The walls were light blue, but were covered in the ravings of a fourteen year old girl. Madeleine informed me this was so her parents would finally let her paint her walls a different color. Black sharpie sketched out curse words I'd never heard or seen before, mainly dealing with her parents, or her sisters. The sentences varied in size, in an arbitrary sense. Her fucks ranged from one inch to a foot tall. Hayley told me they'd read all her walls several times. The writing grew scarcer as I looked up the wall, eventually stopping at 6 feet up.

I only saw Hallie's room like that once. The few other times I went to Madeleine's house we didn't venture into that chamber, and by the time I was in high school they'd moved to a different neighborhood. I couldn't have stood in there more than ten minutes but the strong, unadulterated adolescence that was contained in those walls were a new idea for me. Anger being open was something I had never seen before. The fear of Hallie's return coupled with the dark urge to keep reading, was something that stuck with me. Like I find myself wanting to go into stranger's homes, not to steal anything, but to rifle through lives like a deck of cards.

Prompt One: Where

Describe a place. Tell us how it smells, looks, feels, is, how does time work there, what was the first or last time you where there, how did you discover it ect. Associations you have with it, emotions, memories. You can go in all or none of these veins. You can go on a tangent, but in the end, I want to know the place.

I believe this is to be posted by the 26th

TYPEWRITER & co.

The purpose of this blog is...to share writing, fulfill writing assignments and find motivation on dreary days, and not-so-dreary days as well. This part we know.

Now for the logistics:
Once a week I shall put up a writing assignment. By the end of the week you will put up the finished (or unfinished) work on the blog, with the title of the work as the name of the piece.
For organization purposes, you 'label' your work with name, the number of the assignment (written out i.e. 'one', it should pop up because the actual assignment will be tagged as such as well.)
Additionally, you will post the piece within that week, so that it will show up in the chronology in the side bar as that weeks piece. If you for some reason put it up late, you can open up 'post options' before you actually publish the post, and change the date to when it should have been published. This way you will be able to view all the pieces done for the assignment within the heading of one week on the sidebar.
If you have an idea for a prompt/assignment, you will contact me and I will put it up, just so that there they come up at a steady pace.

If you have any questions or comments, post them here or contact me by phone/e-mail/facebook.

and yes: you will. and you will enjoy it too.


edit: the purpose of the labels is that you can click on them and find all the correlating posts. So if you click on the word "prompt" all the prompts will come up, the word "one" all the posts for the first prompt will come up, and the prompt itself, the name "Margaret" all of Margaret's pieces will come up.
which means that a piece that is not a prompt should not have the word prompt in the label, but that otherwise you are free to label things as you like.

2ble edit: I don't know if it's just that no one has names for their pieces, but you can call them something and put it as the title.