Prompt #4

Title First

Hello and thanks for being here! For those of you who are new, I’m posting 52 prompts in 2024 in hopes of writing a story a week. Some stories are tiny; others are longer. Doesn’t matter. They all count toward the final goal.

And a big thank you as well to all who are playing along with me in the comments. I’m getting a kick out of this, and I hope you are, too. Let’s keep going!

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A couple of things:

1.     It’s highly likely you’re not going to love every prompt I post. But I’m hoping you’ll try doing them anyway. Stretch your writing muscles. Why not?

2.     Some prompts will take you longer to complete than others. Do as much or as little writing as you wish.

3.     If you just can’t get yourself to try one of the prompts but you want to continue writing “a story a week” anyway, then simply repeat a prompt you enjoyed. No problem. And post what you wrote—maybe tell us which prompt you decided to do in place of the assigned one for that week.

4.     I read everything you post. But I don’t always comment. Often, I will just hit the “like” button. If I don’t comment on your post, it doesn’t mean I didn’t love it.

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Back to our regular scheduled programming.

Recently, I listened to the story “You Are Now Entering the Human Heart,” by Janet Frame and read by Etgar Keret on the New Yorker: Fiction podcast. (I highly recommend “Alphabet Soup,” Keret’s Substack.) It’s a wonderful story, one that takes place at a science exhibit—hence, the title.

(Note: Link to a print version of the story as well as the podcast is at the bottom of this page.)

Here’s how the story opens:

“I looked at the notice. I wondered if I had time before my train left Philadelphia for Baltimore in one hour. The heart, ceiling high, occupied one corner of the large exhibition hall, and from wherever you stood in the hall, you could hear it beating, thum-thump-thum-thump. It was a popular exhibit, and sometimes, when there were too many children about, the entrance had to be roped off, as the children loved to race up and down the blood vessels and match their cries to the heart’s beating. I could see that the heart had already been punished for the day—the floor of the blood vessel was worn and dusty, the chamber walls were covered with marks, and the notice “You Are Now Taking the Path of a Blood Cell Through the Human Heart” hung askew. I wanted to see more of the Franklin Institute and the Natural Science Museum across the street, but a journey through the human heart would be fascinating. Did I have time?”

On the podcast, Keret and Deborah Treisman (fiction editor at the New Yorker) follow the reading with a discussion of the story.  During the discussion, Keret mentioned something I found super interesting. The gist of it was that sometimes a story emerges (“is half-born” I think he said) from the title. Usually, we think of a title coming after a story is written. But in this case, Keret wondered if perhaps Janet Frame had come up with the title first—like, perhaps, she had been at a science museum and seen a sign with the exact words of the title written on the entrance to an exhibit: You are now entering the human heart. And once she read that sign, the story sort of came to her. The title gave her the story, instead of the other way around. Or so he posits.

I’ve never written a story that way—writing the title first, and so I thought it might be fun, or at the very least, interesting, to give it a shot! Do you want to try? (Yes!)

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Here’s this week’s prompt:

Write a story/paragraph/poem/whatever, using one of these titles as your guide (about 400 words, or whatever works for you):

We Are Now Approaching Our Destination

In the Event of an Emergency

We Are Not Responsible for Your Valuables

We Expect a Bit of Turbulence

We Apologize for the Inconvenience

Please Take a Seat and We Will Call Your Name

You May Feel a Little Prick

Call if There Are Any Changes

 Return Instructions Inside

 Portrait of the Artist as a ________ (fill in the blank)

 It’s My Party and I’ll ____ If I Want To  (fill in the blank)

The point is to choose the title FIRST, and THEN write the story.

(Also, feel free to come up with your own title if you want to—you don’t have to use one of mine.)

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Let me know how it goes in the comments! Have no fear! Give it a try.

See you next Monday.

*You can read Janet Frame’s story in print here: https://mrchrisattlc.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/4/8/23481786/youarenowenteringthehumanheart.pdf  

And I believe this will take you to the podcast: https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/etgar-keret-reads-janet-frame