⚡Day 15. Unconventional containers.
Surprisingly adaptable hermit crab.
Welcome to the fourth and final week of Flash February. You’re doing great. So far we’ve: searched for inspiration, nudged our anecdotes towards stories, and played with form a little bit. This week, we’re exploring how structural constraints can foster creativity.
On Monday, we played with extreme brevity. On Tuesday, we wrote a long sentence. Today, we’re writing a story in the shape of something else—a hermit crab essay.
PROMPT #15
A successful hermit crab—any story, really—makes an organic connection between form and content, which amplifies both elements. For example, in “Hummingbird Heart,” Eric Boyd tells a bird rescue story (which takes place in a bar) as a cocktail recipe; Dorian Fox breaks down a gun assembly to try to rebuild a relationship in “How to Build Resentments (List of Parts).”
Try your hand at a hermit crab essay!
You can apply this prompt to either drafting or revision.
If you’re drafting a new story, you might start with the form: a lab report, an online dating profile, a court order, a parking ticket, a phone call to a representative’s office—really, anything you have some familiarity with. What is this shape, and what do you have to supply to make a credible facsimile of the form—and what kind of story does the form lead you to? Perhaps you’ll discover you were drawn to this form subconsciously, in order to tell a specific story.
If you’re starting with an existing draft of a story—perhaps something you’re stuck on—you might consider shapes/items/places that already play a role in the story. Or, you might think about items/forms that are currently on the periphery of the story but might be used to give it shape. How could adapting your current draft to this new form revitalize it and make it easier to approach?
Write for at least 20 minutes, and have fun!
Share: The beginning of your story.
On Caring for Flowering Plants
<Provide plenty of light, even direct sunlight. Place indoors or in the garden in a sunny place.>
The first time you found your mother still in bed in the nursing home, you’d known not to bring her a pot of purple calla lilies, because those are funeral flowers.
After a two-hour train ride from NYC to the Jersey Shore, you’d wanted to bring her into the courtyard because it was a bright afternoon and, even on the days she wheels herself along the corridor into the Sunroom, she never leaves the building.
Yes. You are mixing up tenses. By now your mother has stopped wheeling herself.
She slept on and off for the two hours you stayed at her bedside.
<Keep soil* moist.>
*Note that you initially wrote soul instead of soil.
Her grave will be dug into the earth-- not soil, which is for growing things and not dirt, which is for daughters who have regrets.
<Pinch off and remove faded flowers.*>
*These are the regrets:
... ... ...
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Debra L. Eder
Moving Sale: Tomorrow only! Don’t miss your chance to buy everything from a piano to a dining table to semi-precious jewelry. If you’ve been looking for ladies sandals sized-8-wide and elastic waist pants sized 10-petite-wide, you’ll find them at our yard sale. Items include a wok with a shellac of burnt sesame oil and pots that reek of fermented soybeans! Please arrive early; our ad says 9am-6pm but if you knock lightly at 6:30am (ssh! Don’t wake our seventy-seven-year old mother) we’ll sell you her faux Turkish rug dotted with kimchi stains and even throw in the grey couch with a pull-out-bed. We’ll add our mother’s faux-mink-Korean blanket at a discount! It’s warm because she was just sleeping on it and the brown stains aren’t what you think: they’re fresh chocolate stains. We can’t get her to stop eating in bed! FREE: phone books from the past decade, Jello packets from the 70s, bags of mismatched plastic containers and lids and more!