It's Giving Main Character Energy

Weekly writing prompt #14, and my response to #13

This year I have a personal goal to do more writing “play,” so I’m creating weekly prompts for myself and sharing online, in case you’d like to join me too. I hope you will! Teachers, you’re welcome to use these with your students. I’ll be posting these every week on my website, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Substack.¹

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I loved this essay from Ali Edwards, about the big brown couch that has been with her through multiple stages of life.

“The BBC [big brown couch] has seen Star Wars at least twenty times (probably even more). So many movies and shows. I wonder if it has a favorite.”

I was delighted by the thought of imagining an object with main character energy, and so that’s the inspiration for this week’s prompt.

Thinking about an object as the main character of a story brings to mind two picture books: A Couch For Llama, written and illustrated by Leah Gilbert, and Rick the Rock of Room 214, written by Julie Falatko and illustrated by Ruth Chan.

In Rick the Rock, Rick and the other objects who live with him on the Nature Finds shelf in Room 214 are personified. They have dialogue with each other and Rick yearns for adventure. But he is also still very much a rock. He can’t really move himself around, and while he interacts with the humans in the story, it’s in a rock-like way. He’s not having conversations and sharing his thoughts with the humans.

In A Couch For Llama, there are actually two couches in the story and neither one is personified. But the story gives a sense of life experienced by each object. One couch is very well-loved by its family. So well-loved, in fact, the family decides to get a new couch. The new couch falls off the roof of their car as they bring it home, unbeknownst to the family, and it lands in a field where Llama lives. Llama befriends this couch (in one of my all-time favorite sequences of illustrations), but of course the family soon realizes their new couch is missing and has to go back and retrieve it from Llama, who does not want to part from their new best friend.

Both stories are super adorable and so well done. Highly recommend checking them out!

My Response to Writing Prompt #13

Here is last week’s prompt:

When I sat down to respond to this prompt, I re-read the list of words and felt overwhelmed by the idea of choosing three. My thoughts kept bouncing from word to word, each one giving a tiny spark of an idea, but there were so many possible connections I could make between words. It was like standing in a clearing with ten paths around me. Which do I take???

I found it interesting that having more options made it feel harder, not easier. I’m curious if others felt the same way, or if some writers liked the variety of options.

After deliberating for a while, I reminded myself that this is only a creative exercise. There’s no “wrong” path, so just pick one and get going.

I started with the black cat, because I like cats. And I decided to make the cat my main character. I went to the circling hawk next, which is funny because it doesn’t actually appear in what I wrote. But it’s there, in my imagination, circling over a huge overgrown field, which helped me imagine a setting and backstory for the cat and how/why it came to this field. And if the hawk is soaring, there must be wind, so there was my third word. When I started writing in my notebook, I thought the hawk would enter the story, and maybe if I’d kept writing it would have, but instead a different item from the list popped up.

This exercise was a good reminder that when we feel overwhelmed, it can help to pick one thing. Focus your attention on that and start there. The rest will often fall into place.

Here is what I wrote: