I don’t write from prompts. I have nothing against them and they’re great if they get you writing when you might not have. After all, Friday Fiction Inspiration is designed to be a more advanced form of writing prompt where instead of just being handed a sentence, you look into something until you see something to write about.
My problem with prompts is that to me, the world already is one huge writing prompt and the last thing I need is another thing to put on my pile of things I want to write about but will probably die before I have a chance to. However, this week I had one I was forced to write about. It wasn’t optional and it was timed. I had only 25 minutes to write 300 words on this:
Write about a place that was important to you in your childhood.
Since 25 minutes means zero time for editing, what follows isn’t polished, but it’s what I came up with. I like it and I think you will too.
Whose woods these are I no longer know. Where those woods are no one knows because they no longer exist except in my mind. For what were trees are now houses, and the people who live in them have no idea that they live on what was once sacred ground to me and other neighborhood kids until the millennium came and so did the developers.
For someone born in the mid-1970s, home was where you went when you were done playing. Video games were something you did when you’d tired yourself out from playing hide and seek, chasing and catching garter snakes, building tree forts or seeking out others and raiding them for building materials, or simply being where it was quiet, talking to other boys about what girls would like and be like with the confidence that only someone on the cusp of adolescence can have.
We’d worn paths into and out of and through the ten acre woods behind my best friend’s house. A time before blue filters because our filter was green in the summer, yellow and red in the fall, and bare brown branches filtering a gray winter sky that would slowly become more blue as the buds came back and the trees grew a little, but always less than we had.
Those paths are much wider and instead of being made up of blades of grass worn out by muddy sneakers, they’re made of asphalt and concrete. We had never given them names because only we knew where they went. They’re all named now: Parkview Drive, Elm Street, and Madison Avenue. Their map looks different than ours did, one scribbled in pencil when we’d split up into boyish factions and divided the woods into our own turf, back when we touched leaves because that was before there was only grass left to touch.
I’m sure you can do better. Let me know in the comments!
I'd love to hear from you!