Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Out of frustration comes a new story

Yesterday, I was ready to throw my poor defenseless laptop out the door.  Frustration over my main manuscript was at a peak.  It's something I don't usually have to deal with when I write.  So I gave up...sort of.  Walking away from it ended up to be a good idea.
My 'Twitter friend' @A.M.Supinger is having a writing contest on her blog and asked me to enter it.  She said it would be 'fun'.  I wasn't sure about it when she asked me.  It was a short story contest, but the week before, I'd entered a short story contest of another 'Twitter friend @MichelleSimkins.  I'd never written a short story and one of the criteria was to use these pictures as a writing prompt.  I started thinking about the pictures and a 2,000 word short story began creeping out of me.  After several hours of writing and rewriting, I had, what I thought was a pretty cool story.  I'm a newbie writer to begin with, but writing a short story had never appealed to me. Never thought I could do it.  Turns out it was because I'd never tried.
So, a week later, I tried again.  Another 2,000 word short story with the writing prompt being, "Haunted Love".  The short story required those two elements in it and was due by June 28th.  Since I'd written one short story using pictures of the Stone house, as the story was called, I decided to use pictures from a friend's vacation I'd seen on Facebook.  It was an Inn they stayed at on Bailey Island in Maine.  I've never been to Maine, so I looked at her pictures and then looked at the Inn's website as well.  After looking at the pictures, another story started popping in my head and I started writing.
Once again, my brain shocks me at how it works.  Characters and things that happen to them just appear in there and I just write down what I see.  So, around 12:45 this morning, I'd finished my story, edited it and was ready to send it.  Once I put it in the body of the email, I decided to wait and look over it one more time when I was a little more coherent.  So this morning, I edited a little more and sent her a tweet announcing that I'd emailed it to her.
Two short stories in two weeks...working on them for not that long.  I didn't think that was too bad.  I may actually be some sort of a writer after all.

3 comments:

  1. I think that's fascinating, writing a story from a picture. I've not tried it before, but am definitely intrigued. Congrats on spreading your wings in a new direction! :-)

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  2. Thanks for being so encouraging A.M. and SP. I appreciate it! And thanks for commenting. :)

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