Dust and a dream
Two words that don't belong · 20 minutes · Published
Read this first
This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925). Project Gutenberg #64317
The prompt
Draw one coarse, concrete word at random, dust, grease, rust, anything from today's paper, and one large abstraction, hope, a gift, a dream, then write a short portrait of someone whose story you give away in the first line: how they turned out in the end. Make the two drawn words meet in a single image, and let that image say why you cared about them. Keep writing until the pairing stops sounding accidental.
Set a timer for 20 minutes.
Short version · 10 minutes
In ten minutes, draw one coarse word and one abstraction and build the single image that makes them belong to one person.
The move
Two words that don't belong. Let chance impose an unlikely pairing, two words or a hypothesis, and write until both belong in the same piece.
Tags: imagery and constraint.
In a group
A way to run it with a writing group:
Blind vote. The texts are gathered without names, read and voted on. Then the writers make themselves known and the choices are discussed.
Where the page goes next
Scrin is a home where pages grow into books: you keep writing, from an untitled line to a chapter, and Scrin keeps the rest.