Words Down Writing Prompts - 12th Dec 2022

All prompts from The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith

Speed Writing Prompts

1. And a lot of what you said made me feel a bit

And a lot of what you said made me feel a bit melancholy, to be honest. I mean, I know you're happy with all the things you've done and all you've achieved, and I'm happy for you, I really am, but I just can't help but compare all your success with all of my, by comparison, abject failure and it just ... made me feel a bit shit if I'm completely frank. I mean, go you, but also fuck you and your perfect life.

2. You want to think you’re a saint

You know, doing a nice thing for someone does not immediately make you a good person. It doesn't make up for all the stuff you've done before that ruined lives and took away people's happiness. You've found a new purpose in your life now and maybe you've learned something but you want to think you’re a saint and you've got a long way to go before people will think of you as anything but a bastard.

3. Man owes a debt to his wife

(A dodgy sequence of dodgy haikus)

Wife gives up her job
Focuses on home making
Changes all her dreams

House is kept lovely
Man owes a debt to his wife.
Works hard, always out

Wife then gets lonely
Wife finds better things to do
Man finds self alone.

4. You’ll pay in cash; it’s the wages of sin

We have a few special offers this week, and there's a menu on that wall over there. If you take up any of the special offers of course, you'll pay in cash; it's the wages of sin, quite literally. We can't be putting these things through the books now can we? HMRC think we're a proper legit therapy studio. 

5. But then she come to

(more dodgy haikus. I struggled with some of these prompts)

But then she come to
The world all as she left it
All so familiar

Looks around the room
Decides she will slumber more
Here worse than nowhere

Unconscious again
Dreams can be terrifying
So can reality

these places take turns
At first being the escape
and then the nightmare

Fifteen Minute Prompt

Tell the story of a relationship with multiple voices telling the story, like a multi person monologue, based on a section of "The Wife of Willesden" where Zaire and Alvita are discussing Alvita's relationship with Ryan and how it went bad. 

I tackled this by imagining it was me and my partner talking to someone else about a big issue seller that I know.

K: 

So we saw her again, she was there in the square

with her big issue bag looking hopeful...

H:

                                     ... but yeah

By the time we walked past with some cash for her though

She was gone.

K:

             Her train might have been late in the snow.

When I first talked to her she looked cold as the night

So I bought her a scarf. It was fluffy and white 

And now when I see her she always says hi

H:

She's probably hoping you're going to buy

A big issue.

K:

             I doubt it. A very long time has gone past

Since I bought one of those. I just usually give cash

Or sometimes a sandwich but she likes to chat.

Her husband's a wrong-un, and his dad's a twat.

Though she'd never say so. I found out this all

from the girls on - you remember that old sandwich stall?

H:

Yes that's gone now too, which is a proper shame.

They did lovely butties.

K:

                         Cheap too, so that came

To be where I would get the sandwiches we had.

It was those girls who told me the creep was her dad.

H:

Her dad's got another pitch just across town.

Did he once ask for money?

K:

                           Yeah I turned him down

Cos he asked me for two hundred quid for their rent

I was dropping off kids stuff cos she was pregnant.

It was cheeky at best.

H:

                       That's a generous word

He's a creepy old git and a bit of a turd.

But she always seems lovely.

K:

                             She is, you'd be right

But her horrendous life makes her deal with such shite

She gets pregnant each year despite taking the pill

So she's always with child or if not she's just ill

H:

But she's been there forever, she's a fixture of town.

She's outlasted businesses, loads have closed down.

If the market is open she comes on the train

To stand there and sell in the sun and the rain

K:

She just calls me "man", she's forgotten my name

But I've known her for years now, she's always the same.

So if you see her, just by the greengrocer, looking

around just remember she has basically nothing.

Buying her mags could be the difference between

Her kids going hungry or being warm and clean.

Words Down Writing Prompts - 5th Dec 2022

Speed Writing Prompts

1. When they took her away

She was still protesting her innocence when they took her away. She was bundled into the van by two men each of which was twice her diminutive size and weight. They threw her to the front part of the cargo space and slammed the doors, abruptly cutting off her cries and her indignation. The two men put away their batons, got in the cab, and all that was left was the smell of exhaust smoke as it sped away towards the rectification centre.

2. You dream a hundred choices. Each one of them, you know, is no more successful or more likely than the last but you dream them anyway because your comatose body cannot achieve anything at the moment so all you have is the dream. Ultimately you can choose any of them, but it will make no difference as nobody will know. Maybe not even you. You vaguely hear the sound of a voice. They have come back. You're not completely sure who "they" are.

3. Dialogues you keep like train tickets pass through your mind. You have no use for them any more. If anything they clutter up the space and allow for detritus to hide behind them. The dust and fluff of unwanted thoughts hide between layers of dog-eared conversation, long gone and no longer changeable no matter how much you may wish to. They stretch the bounds of your mental wallet, reducing its stability for storage of more important things. Facts. Considerings. Logic.

Prompt 3 was from "Not everything is true" by Salena Godden

4. It's just you feeling feelings again. That is, after all, what you do best. You can always do that regardless of what else is going on. In fact you wish you could do it less. You never seem to stop. You have no control.

5. Pessimism is for lightweights. Look at all the true heavyweights in the world. We're not talking boxers or wrestlers here. We're talking giants of business. Of politics. Of social change. What do they all have in common? They BELIEVE that they can accomplish whatever it is that they set out to accomplish. They are optimists. Even in the face of failure, they set out to try again until eventually they succeed.

Fifteen Minute Prompt 

Based on Mrs Death Misses Death - a chapter from the point of view of a wooden desk.

Write something from the perspective of an object.
Suggested materials:
Sand/sea to glass
Wood table/guitar/ wood
Cotton / clothes/material
Stone / volcano
Metal in ore/ felt tectonic plates shifting

Suggested openings
I could have been …
I remember the tree that I once was …
I learned very early on that …
Over the years I have …
All I know is this, …

My Idea:

Fur coat. Sense of animosity towards the person wearing it. Ineffectually planning to harm them in some way. Memory of being a mink in a fur farm.

-----------------------------------

I suppose I would have been dead by now, had my life not been taken from me by them when it was. The existence I had wasn't a great one, if I'm completely honest, but it was a real life. I had a family. I had many many others of my kind nearby. I could hear them all day and all night as I grew into the creature I was destined to become, then suddenly, blankness. I have a window of time indeterminate during which there was nothing, then air and noise and warmth and the sensation of being touched by many ... somethings. A bit like noses, but longer and thinner and warmer and not wet, and lots of them with different smells. Well I say smells, but not having a nose, or eyes, or ... well any sensory organs, if we're being accurate ... the sensations of sounds and smells landed differently than they did when I was younger.

After a while the different nose-things disappeared mostly, and I was only ever touched by the same few, which I came to realise over the years, were something called fingers, on something called a woman. The woman who was always taking me places, she smelled of mothballs and bitter flowers and mint and old sweat. I hated her then and I still do. How dare she do whatever it is that she's done such that I'm now doomed to stay draped over her shoulders, getting wet in the rain while I keep her warm and dry. When it's not cold and not wet I'm confined to a dusty and stuffy wooden cupboard until it's cold enough for her to need me again. There's more to me than just me, but I cannot detect any sense of the identity of my, presumably similarly unwilling companions. I cannot decide if they, or I, are the lucky one. Maybe they are like me, and they too are lonely. Maybe they can sense me, but I just cannot sense them.

The place I grew up was a dirty place of concrete and steel with "people" around who were apparently charged with my welfare, and that of my fellow creatures. Welfare is a low bar in these places it seems. We had enough to eat, we were kept clean, but we never had space to run. My family were not my parents and my offspring but the chosen family I found within the place. They were like me, with the same fears and the same very limited joys. Sometimes some of us would be taken from our home and we would never see them again. We liked to think they had been taken somewhere better where they had more freedom. More happiness. More light. I now realise that this was not the case for any of them. The ones who constantly tried to escape, who some of us used to look down on for the chaos they caused, were actually the only ones with the right idea. My own fate likely awaited every creature I have ever loved. I am now bonded with an unknown number of the dead, and this one woman who now uses their corpses and my own body as a status symbol. If she needed us such that she might stay alive in the cold perhaps I would not begrudge her that so much, but she spends her whole life in the warmest places and I spend much of my time in those places hung on an uncomfortable rack, pressed up against various types of garment including some made of creatures, some of plants, some shiny, some soft and furry like me. Occasionally I can sense a consciousness there but we have no means by which to communicate so we just wait, peripherally aware of one another's existence, for our jailers to collect us and take us home again.

Here we go now. I am draped loosely over her form like a thick layer of snow on a bulbous mountain. I hear loud noises as something large goes past, belching out a choking smell that I can feel settling on my fur. She even steps back from that. As I always do, I sense the danger of the place where the loud thing moves. I try to push her towards it. I have no power, but I hear her talk sometimes of the power of thought. Of belief. If I can just work out how to use that, perhaps I can bring my own power to bear. Perhaps I can make her take just one more step, into the path of the loud thing, and then she and I will be done with each other forever. It may destroy me as well, but after all this time, I think that would be welcome. I push. I push. She seems to stumble... have I finally done it? No. She's stooping into something warm and fragrant and dark. There's a thud as the door closes then another one, and movement. I shall not have my freedom this day.