Warm-Up

Write for 10 minutes. Introduce a character, a conflict, and end the mini-story with one of the provided phrases. (I chose “And then she closed the window.”)

Victoria sat in her room, staring out into the cold, winter day. She was very sad, but it was a different sort of sadness. She wanted to feel sadness, absorb every facet of it, use herself as a prism through which to reflect all of it through, to see and know the entire spectrum of it. She sat in the bed for a short while, her eyes wandering around her room and back out the window. She took in all the immense, blank, sad emptiness contained in the thin skeleton of trees scattered on the sea of frigid, unwelcoming grains of ice. But she kept noticing the drops of melting ice incessantly dripping from a branch of a tree. And within each individual drop she saw that they, for a brief moment, held the warmth of sunlight — everything that contrasted the bleak world around their tiny, coldly opaque bodies. Each drop flew through the air, splashing and spilling out their brilliant glory on the white, powdery canvas stretched out below them. And then she closed the window….

Song of the Day:

Radiohead – “Fake Plastic Trees”