Monday, November 28, 2011

Prose vs. Poetry Writing Prompt

A while back, a man decided to make the perfect statue. So he sat on his front porch in winter and thought about the statue. He ordered the block of granite, and it lay in his front yard while he pondered. He planned it out in his mind, how he would strike each individual blow and polish it so well that the graceful arc of an arm would slowly emerge from the granite. He planned and planned for so long, that when he finally decided to make the statue, it was late into fall of the next year. The old block of granite was beginning to show signs of weathering and wear, but he knew still what lay beneath. So he began to chip and chisel and carve, and he worked till his sweat poured and he almost began to hate the block of stone. Almost. But he refused to let it win.

So he made it. Then, in the ignition of birth, the statue began to take a life of its own, growing. Growing.

Growing. Expanding, and snowballing into something better than he'd ever imagined. He polished it. He crafted it. And when he was finished: it was a novel statue indeed.

Another man I knew came behind that novelist and gathered the chips of stone that had fallen away, discarded. He pressed them firmly into place in a pool of mortar and lay them in the sun to dry. When he was finished, he took his mosaic home and placed it in his garden. There was something poetic about it there. The mosaic, made of the discarded chips and pieces of the novel, leftover words and fragments of sentences, gathered the sunlight and reflected it into the darker reaches of the garden. It was a beauty in and of itself as well.

Write a short short story in which a statue is the main character. Write the scene from the statue's point of view. See what she sees. Make the statue not human. 


Then, write a poem about the leftover pieces of wood after a carpenter finishes a project. What happens to them? Do they have any stories to tell? Where do the bigger scraps go? The smaller ones? Is there even a drop of jealousy among the various pieces of lumber? Why? 

No comments:

Post a Comment