You can’t go wrong taking a writing prompt from the work of great writers.
You have probably studied the famous Hills Like White Elephants argument by Hemingway. To refresh your memory, a man and a woman are waiting for a train and engage in small talk. The reader quickly sees the relationship is under some stress as the couple tries to engage in normal chit-chat only to end up snapping at one another. Sooner or later, the reader figures out what is never explicitly discussed. The woman is pregnant and they are on their way to have an abortion.
Last week, my writing group decided that it would be fun to try our hands at Hemingway’s game. For our weekly writing prompt, we each wrote an argument in which the subject of the argument was never addressed directly. When we shared our work, we had some diverse results.
A pair of brothers argued in a tent about how one of them never went out to try it. (Turns out they are a family of werwolves and the older brother had gone out into the moonlight to change several times while the younger brother was still too scared to let the moonlight touch his skin and make the change.)
A girl hiding in a storage locker overhears a girl and a man argue about where they are going after leaving so much of her stuff behind in storage. (Turns out it’s a seduction-turned-kidnapping.)
And in another story, a man and a woman are having marital problems. The woman never says a word but her actions and physical reactions to the man tell us all we need to know. (He was having an affair.)
It taught us that as writers, can trust readers to figure out what’s going on in our stories. It takes surprisingly little to bring a reader into your reality. The next step? Try to convey a sense place without explicitly stating the scenes location!
Read ~ Write ~ Wander
~Angie