For the first time in years, I was not online at all this past weekend. It was weird. And wonderful. It actually freed up a part of my brain that I didn’t realize was always thinking about which site I wanted to post and whose feed I wanted to check. When I mentioned this last night a friend told me I should do that at leasst once a week for a 24-hour period. Or more. But he added that I needed to go one step further. I needed to turn off my phone as well.
Just the thought of turning off my phone made me break out in a cold sweat. What if something happened to my kids or my father? What if they needed me and I didn’t know it because my phone was turned off?
And I realized that that’s one of my biggest fears. I have a lot of them; tornados, suffocation, rat tails (not the body of the rat, just the tail), lightning, and a certain smell that I have only smelled a half dozen times in my life that I am convinced is the smell of pure Evil. But being out of touch with my kids and dad is at the top of the fear pile.
And so, in that frame of mind…
Today’s Quote
“As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life.
And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.”
Sherman Alexie
Today’s Prompt: What are you most afraid of? What chills your blood, makes you lose your lunch? Today, embody that fear. Give it bones and blood, dress it up in skin. Make that fear a human being and then put it in a scene with a vulnerable person who does not understand what they are up against. Or write a scene in which you or a character are cornered with that thing that scares you to death… and there is no escape.
Scribble… scribble… scribble…
Ooh I think this was my favorite one so far. 🙂
http://www.clarklori.com/?p=240
Great prompt, Laurie! Thank you.
The idea of focusing on my monsters–which I usually avoid doing–is very scary to me. But also strangely enticing. I’m going to try it. And if I don’t end up in a fetal position on the floor rocking back and forth, I’ll consider it a success.
Ugh, that was terrible. Must go write something funny now . . .
My monster brought out my best word count yet, and an hour of non-stop writing. Woop! Woop! Now I need to go watch some cartoons or something so I can sleep tonight.
After reading everybody’s comments, I feel like they all wrote about something way different than me. I have a few fears, like crows, spiders, and popping balloons, but I didn’t really know how I was going to write something off of those. I spent the whole day just thinking about what I was going to write about, and found it extremely difficult.
I dug deeper than just my touchable fears, and looked for things that I was emotionally afraid of. That’s when it hit me. I have a fear of failure, like, getting rejected from something (like sports teams), or not writing a good enough paper for English, or things like that. Yes, I am in high school, but I am glad to finally be there. And I embrace my fear of failure. I am a perfectionist, which kinda helps explain this fear, but I feel like embracing it makes me better at things. Sometimes it holds me back from doing things as well.
Last night after I started writing, I could not put my pencil down. I wrote about how this fear ate at me from the inside. I wrote about that voice inside my head that I couldn’t get away from no matter how hard I tried, and how it told me I wasn’t good enough for anything.
In all honesty, I think that writing about my fear helped me so much. It helped me to actually realize what I was doing to myself, and how I was holding back from things because of it. Plus, I think that it is one of the best things that I have ever written….