Brainstorming Week Eight
Friday, October 5, 2012 at 12:44PM in Process [The Unwritten Kitten was sick for a week—like, three-visits-to-the-vet- and forcing-nourishment-down-his-gullet-via-syringe sick—and so my writing output has been not so much. But he's better now, and so we return to our regularly scheduled blogging endeavors...]
Week Eight's challenge reminds me of a phrase inscribed in the "buoy's" bathroom at Outward Bound's Hurricane Island center many years ago: "The true measure of a person is what they do when no one's watching." I used to really take stuff like this to heart—I was very lost, but still searching like hell for home. Somehow, these aphorisms felt like guideposts, even if I didn't quite know what to do with them.
[Also, isn't it great that even the bathroom graffiti at an Outward Bound center is meaningful?]
Which is all very interesting, but how to turn the sentiment into a story. "You are a person of little worth if..." isn't the most interesting theme. I don't particularly want to read about someone the author has judged to be of little worth. It's going to read like a parable.
I could turn the prompt inside out: write about a person of great worth who is deliberate with his/her non-verbal actions.
Every so often I come back to the idea that I ultimately want to write in a literary/genre hybrid style, but for some reason in these prompts I keep pushing toward straight literary. Maybe this person of great or little worth lives in a magical fantasy world? Or on a spaceship? Or on a spaceship in a magical fantasy world?
Maybe it's not about a person of variable worth, but the question of how to determine worth is somehow central to the story?
Man. I dunno.
Reader Comments (3)
My brainstorm: A mime has proven to be too casual in his non-verbal moments and finds himself out of work.
Ha. I always go for the serious—your take on the prompt is pretty great, Nick. Write it!
Nice... Great ..