Greetings, writers—
A block and a half up my street is a bright purple house with a wild and wonderful garden: morning glories, snapdragons, guara, nasturtiums, cosmos, coreopsis, etc. A few years ago when I saw the painter’s van pull up, I imagined this house, which is extremely large and sits on a big corner lot, transformed by two coats of a normal, non-hideous color. But the men got out their buckets and painted it bright purple again.
I can almost forgive my neighbors for this assault on the eyes, though, because of the beautiful garden mess and the tame squirrel that lives there. It loves almonds and would’ve definitely crawled up my leg if I’d let it.1
My neighbors’ flower explosion reminds me of a poem I used in an early-2022 prompt, before Good Ideas existed. And because the world’s still spinning for me in unpleasant ways, especially when I look at a computer screen—benign paroxysmal positional vertigo? a side effect of some TMJ problem?—I’m plagiarizing myself and posting the prompt here today. This poem appeared in the January 31, 2022 issue of The New Yorker; you can hear it read by the author here.
SNAPDRAGONS AT THE MARKET
by Lee Upton
1. Note how Upton proposes different ways to see a snapdragon blossom: as bee-stung lip, as jawbone, as curdled grudges. Write a scene in which your character looks at something—an object, a person, a situation—in several different, even surprising, ways.
2. Write a scene in which your character experiences the sorrow of not having done something.
3. Write a scene that begins with the line “For the second night, I am still thinking of you.” (If you’re working in third person: “For the second night, X is thinking of Y.”)
Happy writing—
Emily
Yes, I realize I wrote a squirrel last Friday, too. But this one is alive and not smeared on the fur of a dog!
Oops - or paws, I was writing..so sweet and perfectly illustrative of that squirrel...
Jawbones