A couple of months ago, I wrote a post in which I used The Writer’s Toolbox (created by Jamie Cat Callan) to prompt the beginnings of a story. I enjoyed writing that post so much that I want to do it again with some different prompts. Last time I got some pretty strange prompts, so it will be interesting to see what I get this time.
The Writer’s Toolbox can be found here.
First Sentence stick: “There I was, just standing there, when what I wanted to do was forbidden.”
I looked up at the looming grey fence surrounding the school. Beyond it, lay a forest filled with birch trees. They reached up into the sky, almost like they too were trying to escape. To just grab hold of something that would pull them out of the ground and up into the sky. Away from this dark place. Behind me, the school spread itself over the land. As if it knew how dark and dangerous it was. And it enjoyed that.
I knew what I had to do. I had to find a way over this fence. To escape, and be free. I reach up and grab one of the horizontal bars. I dangle there for a second before reaching my other hand up to hold the bar. I look up at the rest of the fence. It was so tall. A new determination swept over me as I reached up to grab the next bar up.
My hand was inches from that bar when the flash of a bright white spotlight ignited onto my hand and back.
Non Sequitur stick: “Margaret had this habit of spitting. It began to get on my nerves.”
As we sat in the dorms after the day’s lectures, she started again. Spitting on the floor, the walls, other people’s bunks. I closed my eyes to block it out, but could still hear her saliva being thrown from her mouth and landing on a new surface. It must have hit the bunk of one of the other prisoners because I suddenly heard a cry of protest, and knew exactly what was going to happen.
“Hey, Margaret. Spit at me again. I dare you.” Georgia, one of the larger, more aggressive girls in the dorm stood up, her bed groaning from the weight release.
I heard the spit escape from Margaret’s mouth again. She should have just let it go, I thought as I opened my eyes to the scene of the two girls squaring up against each other, Georgia at least a head taller than Margaret. The other girls formed a circle around the pair, preparing for the inevitable fight.
The Last Straw: “that weekend in Grimsby”
The school decided to take us on a field trip to Grimsby. I’m assuming that it’s meant to provide us with that false sense of freedom that we can actually leave the metal enclosure, roam beyond the fence that surrounds us. We’re under very tight controls, however. As we are herded, almost like cattle, off of the coach to see Grimbsy in person for the first time.
Where was it? A few people exchanged glances as we stood before the crumbling dock tower. What once stood so tall only had half of its structure left, and moss was growing in between the bricks. The rest of the town looked like a battle had taken place here. The streets contained empty holes where houses were meant to stand, the roads had debris sprayed across them. It didn’t make sense. We had seen photos in one of our lectures of a thriving docklands town, slowly but surely progressing. So what was this?
Overview:
As soon as I picked up the First Sentence stick, I started thinking about a dystopian society and the rules and fears put in place to control citizens. This put the idea of an institution in my head, in which the protagonist was trying to escape from. Whether this was a prison institution or just a school, I’m not entirely sure yet, but I would like to delve further into that. I’m currently reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr and one of the main characters was in a school for training the ‘more elite’ Hitler Youth candidates in the Second World War, so I was inspired by some of the interactions within that, and the character’s desire to escape once he saw the darkness of the school. When I got the Last Straw stick, I was thinking about how the dystopia can be expanded outside the walls of the institution, to show the bleakness of the Protagonist’s situation, that even if they were to escape from the school, the outside world was not much better. Whether that was because of a war, or just decay over time, I’m not yet sure. This is a story beginning that I would like to explore more though.
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