This week we’re looking at those times when you are given a writing prompt and what comes out is not what you expected (or want). Though we may be working on a novel, a short story, a poem, song, or memoir piece, sometimes we just can’t write toward that project. Instead, we sometimes end up writing what many of my participants call a rant.
The video above addresses this, and offers suggestions for what we might do with a rant once we have it written down. I’m offering you three “shorty” story starters here as well, and what I wrote in response. Have some fun with these.
To start us off, here’s today’s writing quote, a reminder from my mentor, the late Pat Schneider.
Remember that an exercise is just a diving board into the "dreaming place." Start with the suggestion, but always be open to the delicate appearance of something else—something deeper. As soon as that something else appears at the edge of your consciousness, abandon the exercise, and keep writing what that inner vision offers.
The prompts: Three Shorty Story starters
My life is full of annoying men
These little things we're learning
Little domestic dramas
What I wrote in response:
It wasn't the fact that the wheel broke off the portable dishwasher that got to me, though it was annoying, and opened up a potential tirade about how everything is made of plastic now, and how nothing lasts, and is anything made in the US anymore? It wasn't that, per se, it was what happened afterward. Because the dishwasher is ten years old and this fickle, consumer based, capitalistic culture we're living in can’t bear to see the same product produced for more than a year.
So of course, I couldn't find a replacement part.
“Enter your model number here. . .We're sorry, that part doesn't fit your model.” Over, and over and over again, until I was throwing up my arms thinking, "Am I going to have to trash a completely functional major appliance because I can't replace one lousy wheel?"
It wasn’t the first time I struggled to repair the old dishwasher. The first few months of the pandemic, it petered out. I figured it was a short in the retractable power cord, but when I called appliance repair shops in the city, I was told that no one "worked on Danby dishwashers anymore," and one woman even suggested that portable dishwashers have a seven-year lifespan, and it was probably time for me to simply replace it.
And we wonder why we have a landfill issue.
My sexy neighbor, an electrician, came to the rescue. He arrived at my door wearing a mask, took of his shoes, and repaired it for me, and I swear I wanted to marry him. All it took was a screwdriver, some wire cutters, and some good old fashioned electrical tape (in classic black), and voila! My dishwasher was up and running again.
Fast forward to the stupid night when the castor snapped off, and welcome back to this little domestic drama, in which I found myself digging online to find PDFs of manuals that matched the old fashioned paper one that came with my supposedly archaic dishwasher. Then zooming in to a somewhat blurry detail of all the parts, separated, exploding into numbers, and finding the stupid wheel (# 3509) on an obscure website that two days later refunded me, because they no longer carried that part.
I thought, Okay mother fuckers, and out came the rubber mallet, and off came one of the other good wheels, and back on it went again. And I said, I can replace it myself with a little brute strength. I'm going to order one from another model and just make it work. And I wasn't even stoned, but it still took too much time to find a wheel that is now on its way, which may not actually fit at all.
And that, my friends, is what you call a middle class problem, and the very definition of annoying. God damn fucking Annoying, with a capital A.
(Post note: the wheel that arrived did in fact fit my old dishwasher, though when I roll her to the sink, she’s not as graceful as she used to be.)
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