Writing Prompt – Creative Copy Challenge #614
Posted: February 11, 2020 Filed under: Copy Challenges, Uncategorized 11 CommentsThis is a writing prompt. Bet you can’t do it! Take the 10 random words below and crush writer’s block by creating a cohesive, creative short story! And remember: after (if) you finish entering your submission into the comment field, highlight your words and click the bold button to make them stand out and help you determine if you forgot any words. (If you’ve missed previous writing prompts, we BET YOU CAN’T do those, either.) NOTE: Our bolding plugin is gone, so you’ll have to put before and after each of your challenge words if you want them to stand out, but NOT REQUIRED THOUGH! Or, as cleverly done by a CCC-er you can CAPITALIZE the challenge words in your piece.
- Tolerant
- Transcend
- Tranquil
- Therapeutic
- Taboo
- Undercover
- Unselfish
- Uplifting
- Urgent
- Unfold
Dawn Treader
In liminal time
When unselfish thoughts arise
Come from under covers
Unfold yourself
From urgent me me day to come
connect to the moment
Revel in the mystery of taboo dreams
Transcend the un tolerant past future
For in dawn even weeds are uplifting
down time if only
A single tranquil breath
Therapeutic essence
Be selfish take me time
Meg ~
I want you to know, I have come back to read this three times. You draw me in with your words.
Write On,
Kathleen
Don’t stop doing this. I’m lurking at the moment; sinus infection is not conducive to creativity.
Okay, Miss Holly. Because you desire it to continue, we will continue posting challenges.:} I hope you feel better soon!
Write on (when you are up to it),
Kathleen
Jordan, my undoing, was an undercover police officer. Did I say ‘undoing?’ Jordan was my salvation. I send him a birthday card every year to express my gratitude.
He never replies, but I like to think that is not because he still harbors disgust at my breaking the taboo but rather that he is happy to know that the course of therapeutic treatment was a success. That it allowed me to transcend the urgent impulses that enslaved me for so long and unfold new dimensions of my life. If he has not contacted me after all these years to demand I stop writing, then he must be, at the very least, tolerant of the man I have become.
I know, of course, that he did not arrest me from any unselfish motive. No, I was, back then, one of those souls for whom a tranquil existence was intolerable. I did not just break the law, I flaunted it, and he was simply doing his duty as he was sworn to do. But you see, it was the uplifting of me and for that, he will annually receive my thanks that he was born into this world so long as I still have the energy to lick a stamp.
This could go so many ways, Chet. You do know how to create suspense. I don’t know if I’m seeing scenes from A Clockwork Orange, or Silence of the Lambs, or a truly redemptive story here. I’m not even entirely sure where I hope you’re going with it. Part of me prefers the safe, redemptive, happy ending. Part of me is drawn to Hannibal. The only suggestion I’d make is to not draw out the narrative, but to show us scenes that illustrate it. The ol’ “show, don’t tell.”
Absolutely true Holly and thanks. I’m not sure yet but I feel that there’s something to be had there.
Chet ~ I think that Miss Holly said it all very, very well.
You have hooked me again.
I hope some of the words, coming, will help this story continue where it leads you!
Write On,
Kathleen
[…] story inspired by Writing Prompt – Creative Copy Challenge #614 and the words: Tolerant, Transcend, Tranquil, Therapeutic, Taboo, Undercover, Unselfish, […]
I sat on the floor, cross-legged, “Lotus style,” attempting for the 5,678th time to transcend something or other by way of meditation. This was supposed to be therapeutic; instead, it made me itch. Invisible hives. I fidgeted, waiting for the tranquil chime that would signal the end of this torment and let me get back to work. My Captain thought this would be “therapeutic.”
Work. The work was therapeutic. The work was killing me. Not working was killing me faster.
How could I sit here, clearing my mind of all thought, focusing on nothing, when out there – out there – were children being bought and sold like blow-up vinyl sex toys? Made to endure unimaginable things, things that were taboo even in the fantasies of normal men and women? Working undercover had given me urgent purpose, but a deep sickness had taken root in my mind, and in my heart.
This was not the cure.
I no longer understood the term, “tolerant.” My Captain thought my devotion to the job was “unselfish.” Far from it. The last case had unfolded like layers of filo pastry, each one revealing an oppressive layer of nuts beneath treacly sweetness. Slender waifs, dressed up like dolls, used up, discarded–at first, we had thought it was a warehouse for mannequins from the children’s department. Disjointed arms, legs akimbo. Our minds refused to process the scene.
No. Center. Listen to the burbling of the artificial waterfall at the front of the studio. Make the mind a blank.
No, not “unselfish,” Captain. Unselfish would be helping those children, not sitting here with taboo fantasies of my own. I imagined those men we’d arrested, three weeks ago. Imagined them, walking free on some technicality while their slick dick of a lawyer grinned, the way one does after winning a Chess match, crushing the King in a meaty fist. Nothing more than a game, to him. I wondered if he kept a spare set of pawns at home. I imagined those men, their blood splattered like crimson paint from a can lobbed by a cannon against whitewashed walls. I imagined the art gallery where that wall might hang, even as I might hang for painting it. That was…satisfying, if not positively uplifting.
Center. Focus. The work was killing me. Not working was killing me faster.
At last, the chime sounded, and I was free to return to the work.
Cross-posted at https://jahangiri.us/2020/red-paint/
Miss Holly ~~ Wow! You lulled me in and then by the time I got to the 3rd paragraph… How could I sit here, clearing my mind of all thought, focusing on nothing, when out there – out there – were children being bought and sold like blow-up vinyl sex toys?….
Write On,
Kathleen