Tag: Writing Prompts

Awaiting A Feeling

“Where do you see yourself in 10 years?”

It’s such a frequently asked question, but one I’ve never really had an explicit answer to. Sometimes I feel as though I should, especially now I’m closer to 30 than I’d like. It doesn’t always feel good enough to say that I just want to be happy, wherever I end up and whatever I might be doing – but that is the honest truth, at the end of the day. When you strip away all the baggage there is in life, isn’t that what we all want, deep down?

Mum once asked what would make me happy. That was the moment I realised I had no fixed concept of what happiness would look like – that ultimately, it would be a feeling of warmth and security that would come from within. I’d just know. At most, all I have are a few vague impressions of what could bring that. Finding someone special is probably the most pressing one – a relationship feels like one of the few big life things I haven’t had yet. My lack of experience in that department is more and more of an elephant in the room with every passing year, although it’s not easy to make anything happen when you don’t think much of yourself or your ability to make another person happy. Career-wise, it’d be great to put my wordiness to good use as I’ve always intended, but I can’t be certain whether that’ll be as a writer or in another more unexpected way.

I suppose that’s where the fun in having no specific expectations lies, isn’t it? Enjoying the journey and not worrying quite so much about the destination. I recently saw a writing prompt that asked what the biggest challenge in the next six months would be. My answer was similar to what I’ve said here – whatever it is, I’ll keep a cool head and savour all the less testing bits. That definitely applies right now as well, and I’ll have the added excitement of never knowing when or how that wave of happiness will hit.

Mason

Beyond The Wall Of Smiles

Remember that writing group I referred to recently, in one of Winchester’s coffee shops? I loved it, don’t get me wrong, but I haven’t been in a little while. To tell you the truth, work and other stuff – which you’ll find out about very soon – have been taking it out of me a little bit, and there’s the small matter of an ongoing Grand Prix season to consider too. I’d feel uncomfortable sitting at a table of writers knowing Martin Brundle was on his grid walk at home. Most of my Sunday afternoons between March and November are very antisocial.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about the group, though. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about what I wrote last time I went, in the notebook Liz gave me a couple of months ago. It seems pretty apt to share with you, talking about delaying going back to things. “Describe the scene,” they said, as I reached them that morning. “Describe everything you see, hear and feel in as much detail as possible.” Believe me, that was easy enough:

“The coffee shop is alive with the thrum of conversation, and music blasts throughout, but when I enter I know what’s in store. Beyond the wall of smiles at the counter, a trio of disapproving faces awaits me. My only hope is that when I reach them, they’re distracted by their writing, too immersed to even notice my arrival – but they aren’t, and they do. And they haven’t even started, because they’ve waited for me first. Curse my lateness. Turns out I didn’t know quite how long being ‘on my way’ would take.”

Mason

One Sentence

I’ve referred every so often in these posts to writing prompts, or words and phrases that might make good ones. I then ask myself whether I’ll ever use them, but I don’t. If I’m honest, every time I mention one, I know full well it won’t see the light of day again. I don’t know whether that’s because of laziness, a lack of confidence, or the absence of a good idea, but whatever the case I don’t push it. It’s in those situations that I wonder what I’d write if I was put under pressure to come up with something, as I have been on occasion. Two weeks ago, I was tested in exactly that way when I attended a writers’ group at a coffee shop in Winchester.

It’s a place I’ve been a loyal customer of for a number of years now, but until that day I’d had no idea that they met in there. I approached them tentatively, notebook and pen on my lap. Unlike some of the others – including an ex-diver working on a memoir about his time exploring underwater caves in Mexico – I had nothing to share, because this was my first week and I needed to establish the lay of the land. Don’t get me wrong, I was still an active participant, but I kept relatively quiet, only dropping in the odd nugget of feedback here and there. This back-seat approach paid dividends, because it quickly allowed me to feel comfortable around the others and in what I was getting myself into. It wasn’t long before I was scribbling away without a care in the world, which is where the aforementioned prompt comes in.

“What I want you to do,” said the lady leading the session, “is to find the last message you sent on your phone, take it out of its original context, and use it as a starting point for a piece.” All I’m going to do now is present you with the line I found on WhatsApp, and the two-person dialogue that evolved from it. It’s amazing what you can manage when you’re given a little nudge in the right direction. In fact, I think it was enough of a nudge to convince me to go back again soon. Make of this what you will…

“Luckily, I won’t need it today, because I’m busy over lunch.”

“What are you so scared of anyway?”

“What am I scared of? What am I NOT scared of? This is huge!”

“It’s a coffee and a chat, and then you never have to see her again. My mother always said difficult conversations are best had quickly.”

“Or not at all?”

“Oh, come on!”

“It definitely will be difficult as well. She’s hardly the kind of person you can make small talk with. Everything’s either world politics or high culture, and there’s a time and a place for that.”

“Yes…”

(a beat, then the same character speaks again)

“So why did you agree to marry her then?”

Mason

Doors Opening

Over the past three months, I’ve spent a lot of time travelling from floor to floor in a lift, and every time those gleaming steel doors slide apart, I never quite know who I’m going to find on the other side. I don’t always know where they’ve come from, where they might be going, or why. They just depart at the end of our journey and – in most cases – I never see them again. If I do, I certainly don’t recognise them. It was after a few weeks of such mystery had passed that I started to wonder if it could lend itself well to a story of some kind. I would picture myself waiting for the lift as usual, before the doors parted to reveal a sprawled corpse lying within. A lift could be good murder mystery territory, mainly because of the questions it instantly raises – especially if you’re travelling alone. Who could the culprit be? How could they commit their crime in a sealed and cramped space – and how could they do it in the mere seconds that pass between departure and arrival?

If I wanted to introduce more confusion, I could have the occupant vanish into thin air without explanation. It would be even harder for someone to do that in a lift, after all, and it would allow people to ask where they had actually gone as well as how. I love how there is the potential to do so much with so little, and I think that with the right characters and motives, the idea could work well. In any case, it was one I was eager to record here before I could forget it – so you could say that this post only consists of me thinking out loud. Then again, which one doesn’t? It could arguably have made good material for a podcast to follow my previous one, but I have swiftly concluded that my energies are much better suited to writing than to broadcasting! With that in mind, if I write something that I approve of as much as what I have already showcased here, it may well appear for you in due course…

Mason

My Life’s Mission

I am now home for Christmas, having successfully recorded my podcast (which you can listen to by clicking here, if you dare). The first semester is complete and I am free to relax, but university – particularly Publishing and Social Media – has left me with a rather pleasant parting gift, thanks to another magnificent writing prompt. In my seminar last week, we found the following question up on the board:

“You receive an email from an alien. What does it say?”

I started working on my answer there and then, but as I didn’t have the time to complete it immediately, I decided to save it for a blog post. Communication between the human race and extraterrestrial life is often depicted in fiction as being either blatantly hostile or somewhat ominous, so I wanted to try writing something that would be a little bit more heartwarming. It had to convince the recipient that this was an alien coming in absolute peace, as I felt that anything else wouldn’t quite be right at Christmas! I would like to show you my intergalactic email now. How do you think this message would make you feel?

“Hello,

You won’t know who I am, but I feel like we are meant to be. This email will take seconds to travel across the universe, but I have been searching for what seems like millennia. I told myself a long time ago that I wouldn’t rest until I found you. I don’t know what you’d call me, but I guess humans like to refer to us as “guardian angels”. We appear at birth knowing only love. It flows from every part of us and courses through our veins, dictating every action and emotion. From a young age, when our schooling begins, we are told that one day we will pick a face from a crowd – no matter how distant – and watch over them until the day they die without ever revealing ourselves. But when I saw you, I couldn’t resist. I had to reach out, so here I am, writing to you now.

I’ve seen you at your best, when you feel like you’re on top of the world, and at your worst, when you feel trapped, worthless and alone. I want you to know that you are none of those things, and you never will be. Yes, I know people have said the same one minute and been gone the next. Not me – you are my life’s mission. It pains me to admit that you and I may never see each other, and as things stand, this email is the closest I can get to showing you my true form. But, just like a lost loved one, I’ll never truly leave you. Anything out of the ordinary is me making myself known. That muffled banging you think you can hear from the pipes in the dead of night? That’s me. The figure you see for a second in the corner of your eye, before realising nobody is there? Me again. The funny coloured shapes that appear when you close your eye? Yep, you guessed it!

I know humans fear those things, because they can’t explain them, so I’m just letting you know that you needn’t be afraid of them. They’re not signs of danger or death, but a warming cup of tea when you desperately need one, or a hand that you know will be there to catch you when you fall. Look out for them – when you notice one, you’ll know hope, companionship and unwavering loyalty is nearby. You might think you can find us by looking up at the stars, but the truth is that we’re much closer than you could ever have imagined.

– Your Guardian Angel”.

Mason