Our prompts this week were:
- Character: Politician
- Object: Lute
- Genre/Tone: Saga
As has happened before, I completely forgot one of the elements, in this case the lute. For some reason, my brain has trouble holding the entire prompt at once, and this time I fixated on a politician in a saga, and a lute – which would have been easy to include if I’d only remembered it – simply failed to appear.
Oh well, it’s only an exercise. But one of the points of an exercise is to recognize patterns in what you’re doing, both good and bad. So it’s good to notice my bad habit of ignoring part of the prompt. It means I need to (1) pay more attention in the future, maybe referring back to the prompts as a checklist; and (2) that I might do well to seek out simpler story prompts, and/or to give myself more room and time to develop stories.
On the plus side, I think I did a pretty decent job on the tone of the piece. I’m not sure how appealing it is to a modern audience (let me know in the comments!) but it has a few of the more obvious hallmarks of Icelandic sagas.
Continue reading “Friday Freewriting – July 30, 2021 – Robert”