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 |   Second blog -- answers to an ocean of prompts |
 "Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself." CHARLIE CHAPLIN  Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. David Whyte        This is my supplementary blog in which I will post entries written for prompts. |
| Prompt: “We turn memories into stories, and if we don’t, we lose them. If the stories are gone, then the people are gone too,” says Amy Harmon in What the Wind Knows To what degree do you use your memories in your writing? If you use them, do you think of preserving them or do you use them because they fit your story or poem? ------------- I don’t write to preserve my memories. If I wanted to do that, I’d write a memoir, which isn’t happening at any old time. I don’t have that kind of a courage. On the other hand, the memories or rather the distortion of them jump up sometimes during the course of writing and they surprise me when I recognize them, especially when I give a fictional character a memory of an event that actually happened to me or one I witnessed. Also, some of the most surprising (and mostly forgotten) memories that bounce out of nowhere usually happen when I am writing poetry. In addition, there are those events that make me think would work well in a piece of fiction. I jot those down, and if they are in the form of a letter or an object, then I keep them for future reference. |
| Prompt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_year-end_top_50_singles_of_1956 Grab some of the titles listed and use them in your blog entry to tell a story. Have fun! ----------------- The more the fool I am, the more the happy whistler you are, You Long Tall Sally, and I am in love again, standing on the corner on the street where you live, on Blueberry Hill, as I am the great pretender in my blue suede shoes. Now, due to the wayward wind, I’m just walking in the rain, carrying sixteen tons of shame while you are wearing his band of gold, and I can imagine you telling him on the phone, “Tonight You Belong to Me” all because you're in your ivory tower with the green door on Blueberry Hill and you wonder about me, thinking, Hot Diggity Dog Ziggity Boom! Why do fools fall in love? It only hurts for a little while and maybe no, not much for the hound dog that I am, I’ll be home soon at the heartbreak hotel with a sweet old-fashioned girl, and I’ll tell her to love me tender. Then, que sera, sera. |
| Prompt: "If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow." Beyoncé Do you agree with this statement? ---- If everything were to be perfect, we wouldn’t have fiction or poetry, as those things and almost all of the arts depend on conflict and imperfection. Never mind our smugness itself, the absence of the arts alone would give life a bland taste and outlook. Following along the same type of reasoning, can we call a bland life perfect? Which makes me think about perfection. Just what is perfect? According to Wiki, ( God knows from where they got their definition) “Perfection is a state, variously, of completeness, flawlessness, or supreme excellence.” This means where there is perfection, there is no room for change or improvement. That would be so boring, and the fact that it would be boring would make it imperfect. A catch-22 situation, isn’t it? I think it is a better idea to accept that we live in a world that is perfect in its imperfections because it changes, improves, or deteriorates, and this makes us work with those imperfections to produce our fiction, poetry, and all arts, even when we complain of the difficulties those imperfection throw our way. |
| Prompt: "Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrong." Charlotte Bronte What are your thoughts about this? ------------ I think it’s Jane Eyre talking here and I totally agree. Well, if we let other people’s misbehavior or negativity upset us, it is our fault, not theirs. We may have a good reason to blame someone else for our being upset over his or her actions but it is us who decide how we feel about things that happen, including the behavior, words, or actions of that someone else. This is because such things cannot harm us, but our perception of them does. Rarely there may be an exception to this rule, which is when someone works in a harmful way against us behind our backs and we are not aware of it because such actions may generate other actions and negative behavior in yet other people, as in the case of someone slandering or libeling us and making others believe the lie. Still, we must decide not to get upset but work to clear ourselves because when we get upset, we may not be able to think straight to do anything properly. A rule of thumb in protecting us from such people is when someone you know suddenly turns into a different person. A person who can change in a heartbeat has no values or morality. An example of this can be a person who is known as the pillar of a community but who is being found out to be a serial killer or someone who acts like some kind of a criminal when no one is looking. Most of the time, people don’t turn into serial killers and such, but they may start badmouthing and manipulating people and causing chaos. They do it because they like the sense of power it gives them. We should know this and not let their behavior affect us. In short, if we are living to better our lives and ourselves, we must refuse to be dragged back into the darkness of other people. |
| Prompt: David Burns say, “The reason fantasy is an old but thriving literary genre is because fantasy stories speak to emotional truths.” Do you agree? --- Well, that purple heart does not belong only to the fantasy genre because most fiction deals with emotional truths. What the fantasy genre has over the others is the abundance of metaphors, which the readers may or may not catch on to while reading a fantasy story. In other words, the fantasy genre offers emotional truths by cleverly hiding them. So, from where I stand, the quote is only partly correct. Fact is, all fiction is a lie that tells or points to truths, which the readers feel intuitively. The purpose of this telling or pointing to emotional truths is to create empathy. Empathy is the key purpose of all great literature when the stories cause the readers to feel the grief, annoyance, joy, love, and hate that the characters feel. In addition, great literature never shields the readers from evidence or facts by cloaking them with emotion (sappiness). This clashing of emotion with the fact (that is, the facts as we know and understand them) and how a character either accepts his wrong and changes or resists can reveal to a reader a core emotional experience beyond the particular situation in a story. This is what is meant by emotional truths. Thus, within the boundaries of great literature, the fantasy genre is only one player on a crowded stage. |
| Prompt: What does it mean to have the best of both worlds? --- In its largest interpretation, this quote might mean being good on Earth and for Heaven. For other things, it might mean being privileged to enjoy two very different things, mostly at the same time. For example, a mother can have a serious profession she works at full-time but she also enjoys her children at the same time. The reason may be that her boss or her responsibilities are good to manageable and she’s very successful at what she does, and her children at home are getting very good care by a grandmother or a wonderful nanny and she has a good time with them when she’s home. Okay, so this is a rare and a highly imaginative situation, but it may be possible for some and just the idea of that possibility makes me feel happy.  |
| Prompt: Use these random words in your creation Saturday entry. acceptable, jobless, thin, petite, blushing, page, petunia, and delicious. Have fun! ------------ Inedible Offering In delicious expectation, the blue petunia of the nightshade family gastronomically jobless, not really acceptable, but petite and inviting, just a garniture, lies blushing by the side of the thin salad plate at Le Petit Chateau’s webpage. What a spectral preposition! |
| Prompt: “If moderation is a fault, then indifference is a crime.” ― Jack Kerouac ---- Taking the quote at face value and allowing momentarily what it claims to be the absolute truth, does this make “excess” an admirable thing? Let’s consider that. As in everything, excesses, moderation, or indifference depend on the situation they are in. Take health and wealth for example. If followed with energy, health may improve and is good for a person’s wellbeing. Wealth is good, too. After all, who doesn’t want to be rich? Yet, what if you go to excess with your health and wealth and deprive yourself of enjoying life? Is it worth it to spend so much energy that you are unable to experience a day of fun? Some indifference could be beneficial in some things and moderation would help with most things, whereas excess and putting too much energy toward a single idea or goal can upend our destinies. In short, I dare think such generalizations like that of the Kerouac quote are useless and petty, and if they are not exercised toward the right pursuit of our objectives, they only cast shadows on our lives, making them become no longer ours to do something about. |
| Prompt: Write a poem about Spring and April. ------ I liken April to a young carefree girl with an angelic grace slight waist eyes wide open with sweetness and fragrance of flowers and spices, and in her itinerary, a rippling creek, vegetation, and rain for in the stream of time her silky green outfit will take on dazzling summer colors in wavy red-hot patterns and a mature scorching style Such a downgrading gesture to reinvent oneself!  Prompt: What was your most memorable piece of criticism, good or bad? ------ If the critique will help me or is done by a knowledgeable person, I appreciate it greatly whether it is good or bad, but when the critique becomes a criticism with bad intentions, then I see red. Case in point: This was many years ago. Right here in Wdc, a member wanted to get back at me for a reason, in which she was in the wrong, and she re-registered as a gray case to give a one star to a horror story I had just written, and she said something like, “Why do you write such a scary story? Can’t you write something soft and sweet?” It wasn't the one star that got me but her comment. I have no words for such an action. |
| Prompt: Scientists have discovered there are humans (not aliens) living on another planet, but they have one major difference when compared to Earthlings. What's that difference, and what are their lives like? ---- On this planet, in the deep valleys of high mountains and happy creeks and rivers, lay the villages where people live. I don’t know which force had thrown me in there, but I was surprised to find people with bodies like us. I still am as I look back and recall. These people are exactly like us. Even their racial features are akin to those we have on earth. Their one difference is that they all speak the same language as the villages don’t belong to any one country. In fact, the entire planet is one country, in which people travel freely from one village to another in sophisticated air-vehicles. Then, the biggest difference of this entire realm is that no living thing eats another living thing. Although the people's bodies work the same as ours, the air they breathe coagulates and turns into food in their mouths. The same goes for every living thing. The animals, too, feed on air, and there are no plants that eat other living things, and as such, no plant exists resembling the Venus’s Fly Trap on earth. This must be why those plants are smaller but brilliant in colors, colors we don't even know about here on earth. This must also be why these people and all the other living things are so peaceful on that planet. Not that they see everything eye-to-eye, but they are accepting and tolerant of one another. Thus, not only with nutrition but also with their social norms, nothing feeds on any other living thing. Still, I like the taste of our food much better.   |
| Prompt: Sherwood Anderson said, "I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others." Do you agree with his assessment of writing? Let's take it one step further, as a writer we step into other lives (our characters) does writing help us be more tolerant in real life or less because we look at things differently than a non-writer. ------- Yes, there is that escape into other lives factor, but it is only one of the factors. I don’t know how I would look at things as a non-writer because I always wrote, one way or another, ever since I was eight. As a writer, I look at writing as sharing or rather hugging the human inside the readers. Whether writing, especially mine, helps anyone to be more tolerant or not is not for me to say; however, through reading others’ writings, my own worldview, I hope, is becoming enhanced. For example, I have been reading a lot on World War II and its survivors, but I am also reading about the Germans and the Japanese as soon as I find their memoirs or books that reflect their hardships during that terrible time. Whenever I do that, I search for the humanity in everyone. This, I hope, makes me feel empathy for all sides. While writing or reading, it is a good idea, I think, to view the stories that deal with not only human but also, human and animal and human and nature. After all, this planet is the only one our species has. Then, when we write, we are sometimes delightfully surprised to hear a voice, that certain voice of another inside us. It might be a character or something hidden in us popping up to the surface. I believe this is much more than imagination. It is a knowing we didn’t know we had. |
| Prompt: "Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it." Julia Child Write your views on this quote. ----- Oh well, I felt like I am listening to a high school commencement speech. I am surprised that Julia Child would come up with such a one-sided thought because aside from her cooking, she did so many different things in her life, some of them very important. As much as the quote sounds quixotic and idealistic, it rarely works in real life because life is so much richer than one single interest to be passionate about. Then there is that clashing of the words. “Interest” has the idea of some curiosity that is ephemeral and passing, while a passion has a lure that is consistent, all enclosing, and addicted. We may have several interests at any one time, but passion is that one thing you delve into and can’t/won’t get out of because you put your everything in it. As for me, I like my tiny and varying interests. My passion, if I can call it that, is for literature and the arts, which hasn’t changed in my rather longish life. |
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But good job quickly redirecting back to the positive things.
