The Forgotten Prompt!
every week a promised prompt, creating the habit...
This week’s posting left out the prompt! I apologize!
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett from his 1983 story, “Worstward Ho.” I am almost glad to have forgotten and failed just so I can quote him.
(Roger Pic, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Every week there will be a prompt. I promised prompts, and you will get prompts! Prompts are what I do. Some people say they are magical. So here’s this week’s prompt, not culled from Brave Space where I create several pages worth of prompts each week, but from the air, because I care, and many of you already saw the Brave Space prompts, so it doesn’t seem fair to recycle them here every week. I want those who come to Brave Space to find new goodies here too! So here’s the prompt that should have been in yesterday’s Substack.
Mapping Grief - we all have lost loved ones or we will. No one is exempt. The new wisdom about grief is that there is a part of our brain that maps our relationships in terms of time and distance. For living loved ones and those we lose. So when someone we love (or a pet or a thing) leaves or dies or disappears somehow, we have to remap our relationship to them in their absence. This means if Mom was always a phone call away or an hour’s drive, it’s part of our hard-wiring. How do we create a new map for that relationship?
Whether you are starting something new or working in the middle of something, pick a character (or you if it’s memoir) and create a scene, a story, a poem or play, an essay or a journal entry where that character tries to find a way to remap their relationship to something or someone who is gone.
Use both distance and time to reconfigure how that character might manage this loss. Give them something to do while they work it out - an activity like gardening, bringing in the bulbs for the winter, or cleaning the air filters or the gutters with someone, so they have some work to do and some company.
Add a surface conflict they might have between that someone and themself, something to strive for, ground to gain or lose. Maybe this character has a grown son or daughter who is helping out, but they want to borrow some money, something not simple to decide. This adds some interpersonal conflict to the already internally conflicted character (from the mapping of the grief).
3 levels of conflict are always better than 2, so if you can discover how this character is struggling with the world at large, you’ll have all 3. Maybe use the change of seasons in this example with the gardening… nature and time are both great for conflict.
Onward, with my sincere apologies, and the promise that I will fail better next time!
Emma