I’ve been dreaming up some writing exercises and trying to suss out which one I want to post first. And then it dawned on me…what last happened in my own life to make me pick up a pen with a sense of urgency?
It was a found object. I literally found a ring in the gutter on one of my night-time walks around the neighborhood. It’s engraved inside and out, and seems to have once been cherished by someone…so what was it doing in the gutter?
I put a lot of internet snooping into finding the owners of the names engraved inside the ring. As luck would have it, the combination of these two fairly unique names resulted in a couple who no longer seem to be together. Which is sad, of course… I found a picture of them together. They might have been high school sweethearts. It seems that their paths diverged at least four years ago, though.
And then I began to wonder how this ring came to be in the gutter of my neighborhood some four years after these folks parted ways.
So. I began to write.
It seems like the perfect exercise to me. What would you do if you found such an item? What IS the story? Or, bring your own found object to the exercise and use it as a jumping off place into a new story, or as a character building exercise by writing from the point of view of one of your characters…what would s/he do with a found ring? A found…key, pocketwatch, shoe, sweatshirt, pen?…It can be anything! OR have one of your characters be the one who lost, threw away, or intentionally left behind this object of curiosity.
So many possibilities! I might start this exercise over again to go into another story already in the works. Hm…exciting!
Good luck!
Write Under Your Nose 