Prompt #110
I'm No Good at Anything
Good morning.
If you’ve been here awhile, you know that most of my prompts are not “plot” prompts. I don’t usually offer up something like “Put two people in a restaurant. One of them wants spaghetti; the other hates spaghetti and can’t understand why anyone would order it. Conflict ensues.” I prefer prompts that don’t give you the story or conflict, but instead give you a spark to work from.
So here, today, is a spark! And I’ve created this spark by reading a story and then pulling from it. When you see what I’ve done, and how easy it is to do, you’ll never have trouble creating your own prompts in the future.
But first:
You may know the writer Amy Hempel from her most famous story “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.” If you don’t know of Hempel, or if you haven’t read that story, by all means, go read it!
In an interview in the Paris Review, Hempel says the story was written in response to an assignment she’d received in a Gordon Lish workshop:
“The assignment was to write our worst secret, the thing we would never live down, the thing that, as Gordon put it, “dismantles your own sense of yourself.”
And for Hempel, the worst thing was failing her best friend who was dying.
That is not this week’s prompt! No worries!
Instead, we are going to look at another of Hempel’s stories: “Pretty Story,” which was first published in Salmagundi in their Fall 1996 issue.
Here’s how the story begins:
No one has ever told me that I am good with children. A short time ago, I went to a dinner party. The hostess was setting the table—there were eight of us that night—when her daughter, barefoot seven-year-old, demanded we play the game.
The narrator goes on to tell us the many ways in which she feels she is not good with children. Where is all of this leading? We don’t find out until the last sentence.
Here are a few more lines that appear in the story:
I am not good at games
A psychic has told me I will have two children.
The appetite of a baby is a frightening thing to me.
Here’s a good baby story
Okay, please go and read the whole story. (I know you won’t. Well, some of you will. But either way, okay, I accept you for who you are.)
And now….
TODAY’S PROMPT
Choose one of the following phrases, which I have pulled and tweaked from Hempel’s story:
“No one has ever told me….”
“A short time ago….”
“I am not good at…”
“A psychic once told me….”
“_____ is a frightening thing to me.”
“Here’s a good ____ story.”
Using the phrase as your starting point, write your story.
Alternatively, pull a very short phrase from the story that I didn’t already pull.
OR, pull a very short phrase from another short story.
OR write this story: “Put two people in a restaurant. One of them wants spaghetti; the other hates spaghetti and can’t understand why anyone would order it. Conflict ensues.” (If you didn’t read from the beginning and only scrolled down to “today’s prompt,” then you missed this joke. That’s okay, it’s not all that funny.)
That’s it. Short and sweet!
See you next time!
Newcomer note: Stories that are four hundred words or less have a far greater chance of being read than longer ones!
Bob is dead. He was a terrific writer.
He made money writing about travel in NYC. He never said much about it.
He’s dead because of spaghetti and meatballs. One of those Friday night All You Can Eat Spaghetti Specials. See, he had a glass of wine or two and forgot about his heart. Then he ordered the spaghetti. His heart was a problem before. Attacks, shunts, balloons, bypass, I don’t remember. Maybe all of it, maybe none, but there were problems.
Which didn’t deter donuts either.
His letters over the winter would go on and on about money making schemes. Maybe he’d convert the mothballed Grand Manan ferry into a hotel. They only wanted a mil for it. Maybe the family would move into a tent and rent their 1844 house to a carpenter who would finish the renovations for rent. It was one of those houses, like you could see from one end to the other through the plaster lath, the half demoed walls. And somehow you could see up through the floors to the attic too.
The heart attack came not long after he finished the Friday Night Spaghetti Special. He made it to the hospital but died there. I wonder what he would have written about that event. Such a good writer. We wrote letters to each other over the winter. At his service I told the stories about the ferry, and his house plans, and everybody laughed. They all knew what a dreamer he was.
The cold New England winters found their way into the house too. It was too much for his widow, with two young children, and after Bob died she sold the old house Bob loved and moved to town.
No one, not even Mamma, ever told me about this. She told me lots of things, Mamma, but never about this, about how I could avoid it or welcome it, depending, about how I’d feel about it, about how long it would last.
But here I am, in the middle of it, or maybe it's still the start. Am I happy? Too soon to tell, probably. Maybe I’ll get used to it. Am I comfortable? As comfortable as you’d expect, given the circumstances.
Mamma told me so many things, I guess she forgot about this. It’s understandable. With all she had to deal with, some things were bound to fall away. Like Jake. And Baby Louise. But we managed to move on, once we became comfortable with what had happened. Twice, it happened.
Mamma wasn’t as careless as all this makes her sound. She had so much to deal with. I already said that, I know, but it’s worth repeating, so you understand that when this happened, and I was surprised, I want you to understand that I don’t blame Mamma for not telling me about it. Anyway, how could she have known that I’d be here at this particular moment and that circumstances would be just right, as it seems they were? I mean, I’m probably fated to go through this, right? It’s always been in the cards for me, given my life, and Mamma’s. My eyes are blue, my hair is blond, and this was bound to happen.
Mamma tried to run from the tide once. She thought it was funny, wanted me to laugh. First, the tide went out and it was easy to run from it, and I did laugh. But then the tide turned, it came in, came in very quickly, and she couldn’t run fast enough. From my seat in the lifeguard chair I saw her wave as she went out. All I could do was wave back. Wave, wave, wave.
So now, you see, now that it’s happened, I can’t ask Mamma about it, or why she didn’t tell me it would happen, since she must have known it would, given me, given her, my blue eyes, my blond hair. I'll have to wait and see how it turns out.