Lost and Found Items

Weekly writing prompt #10, and my response to last week's prompt

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 Wednesday on my website, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Substack.¹

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Have you ever found an item left behind by a stranger that revealed something about the person? Maybe it was a receipt at a grocery store, and you can deduce from what they bought that they must be planning a birthday party. Or maybe you’ve found an inscription or annotations in a book that told you something about the person who added them, or the person the notes were written to. If you’ve read my novels Sisterhood of Sleuths or Book Scavenger then you already know I’ve thought a good deal about messages left and found in books, and it’s that line of thinking that inspired the writing prompt for this week.

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My Response to Writing Prompt #9

I went a bit long with this one—I filled four pages of my writing notebook instead of my typical two. As I began, I had an idea of what might happen in the scene, at least as far as the characters involved. The nearby item I picked for the character to find was a cat-shaped timer I keep on my desk, except that once I got into writing the scene I completely forgot about that part of the exercise and went with something else. Whoops! That’s okay though—these prompts are meant to start us off, they’re not meant to be strict rules to follow. I think what I ended up using feels more organic to the scene and characters, and my cat timer would have felt a little forced. Maybe I’ll do this prompt again but start with the object instead of the characters. Hmmm, that would be interesting to compare the difference.

I enjoyed writing this scene—the characters remind me a bit of the Sisterhood of Sleuths cast, and I love those characters. When I read my words back over, I immediately spotted wording I would change and edits I would make, but that’s as it should be. My initial response is the very beginning attempt at something. I wouldn’t even consider this a rough draft—it’s a step before in the idea generation stage. This is the sort of thing I do to work through my ideas and experiment. I would call something a rough draft once I’ve actually committed to the idea.

What item did you pick for your response? Did you start your response by writing about the item or the character? I’d love to know!

As a refresher, here is the prompt from last week:

And here’s what I wrote: