THE PROMPT
This is one of the front windows of Reads & Company Bookshop in Phoenixville PA. The stage is set for books to display.
Write a story inspired by this photo.
THE AUTHOR
A former copywriter and television executive, Robb Cadigan is a novelist (Phoenixville Rising) and co-owner of Reads & Company, a first-class independent bookstore in Phoenixville, PA.
Read A Book, Support An Indie
This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.
ROBB CADIGAN, PHOENIXVILLE RISING
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I used the idea of a display in a shop window to be part of a search by the protagonist in my novel who is researching her family history in Portugal.
860 Flash fiction. The reflection of the building across the street caught the viewer’s eye. Movement. A curtain in the reflection. Was that a face? An elderly person’s face? White like the curtains? Not sure. Too quick. Curtains match the paged walls. Trying to read the card in the sketching model hand, she bonks her head on the glass. Time enough to read. To absorb the words. Tomorrow. She will come back when the shop is open. The hands on the antique clock remain at ten past ten. An omen. To come back at ten past ten. A flutter of white. She releases the wheelchair brake. Reaches with a gloved hand and spins the chair in an about-face. Sees the sign on the shop across the road, and the person standing on the balcony.
I used this prompt to expand a piece in my novel that I felt was a bit ‘thin’. It worked really well because I saw that the context of place and atmosphere was missing in my first attempt . The photo was inspiring and triggered all sorts of tenuous links to my central character. I extended my piece by an amazing 425 words of description and emotional memories.
When I saw the open trunk in this photo, I immediately pictured someone being sucked down into it. I wrote 600 words of a story about a boy who finds the old trunk and an old typewriter in his Grandma’s attic. When he starts typing a story about a boy boarding a four-masted ship, he feels himself getting sucked into the trunk…then he pops out to find himself on a wharf looking at the ship he was just writing about…to be continued…
The protagonist is an assassin who doesn’t get to browse in bookstores any more. She sees her sister-in-law’s place across the street in the reflection in the bookstore’s front window. The SIL will also be part of the job, but the protagonist thinks it will go badly.
I got ~ 400 words of intro on this story. I hope to finish it in the future.
The prompt inspired a 500-word essay when I chose the trunks, the chair and the typewriter. I thought of Emily Dickinson when I saw the cushioned chair, Flannery O’Connor came to mind in the trunks and a woman no one outside of Massachusetts ever heard of, Priscilla Winehill, thrice married, seven kids from two of those marriages, a newspaper correspondent. Enjoyed this immensely, really put my imagination, memory and knowledge to work and muscled an essay out. Thank you, Julia, and Robb Cadigan for the prompt.
Added a 500 words story inspired by the photo, set in the post war era!
I have added an average of 1,000 words a day to my novel in progress. Sometimes I use the prompt as inspiration for a scene; sometimes I use it for a warm-up exercise. – Am very pleased.
Oh yes. I’ve had years where I’ve had to stop pretending I”m going to write a StoryADay in May because it got me so revved up to jump back into my novel-in-progress 🙂